RUIN ME QUIETLY

Chapter 5

The wedding took four weeks to plan and less than an hour to perform.

Wren stood at the end of an aisle she hadn't chosen, in a dress she hadn't picked either — selected, along with everything else, by a wedding planner Callum's family had insisted on, a woman named Delphine who spoke about floral arrangements with the intensity of someone negotiating a hostage situation. Wren had stopped offering opinions after the second week. It hadn't seemed to matter. This wasn't her wedding. It was a press release with vows attached.

She found Callum at the altar already watching her walk toward him, and for one disorienting second, she forgot this was a transaction — forgot the contract, the files still sitting unread in a drawer at home, the two years circled on a calendar. He looked, briefly, like a man actually waiting for her.

Then his eyes flicked, just once, toward the third row.

Wren didn't have to follow the look to know who sat there. She kept her spine straight and her steps even, and by the time she reached him, whatever she'd almost let herself feel had folded itself back into something manageable.

"You look like you're attending a funeral," Callum murmured, low enough for only her to hear, as the officiant cleared his throat.

"Aren't I?"

Something almost like a real smile touched his mouth. "Depends who you ask."

The vows were short. The kiss was shorter — brief, correct, exactly as much as a room full of cameras required and not one degree warmer. Wren felt the entire building exhale around them, felt Callum's grandfather's satisfaction radiating from the front row like heat off asphalt, and understood, with the particular clarity of standing inside your own life while feeling completely outside it, that she had just become Mrs. Vance in front of two hundred people, none of whom actually wanted her there.

Seraphine left before the reception started. Wren noticed. She suspected everyone did.

The house Callum brought her home to that night wasn't the penthouse from the society pages — a townhouse instead, older, quieter, tucked behind a gate on a street that didn't advertise what it was worth. He'd mentioned once, in the flat voice he used for things that mattered to him, that his mother had picked it out before she died. Wren hadn't asked follow-up questions. She'd learned by then which doors he left open and which ones he didn't.

"There are two guest rooms," he said, setting her bag down at the base of the stairs like a man handling something breakable and trying not to show it. "Whichever one you want."

"Convenient," she said. "For a marriage."

"It's a business arrangement, Ms.—" He stopped. Corrected himself, something flickering across his face that she couldn't name. "Mrs. Vance."

"Don't," she said, sharper than she meant to. "Not tonight."

He studied her for a long moment in the dim hallway light, and something in his posture shifted — the careful control of the whole day finally cracking at the edges. "You're angry."

"I'm tired." It wasn't entirely a lie. "It's been a long day of performing a marriage for people who'll forget my name by Thursday."

"They won't forget your name." He said it quietly, like it cost him something. "That's rather the problem."

She didn't know what to do with that, so she didn't do anything with it. She picked up her bag and started up the stairs, and she was three steps up when his voice stopped her.

"Wren."

It was the first time he'd used her first name without the surname attached, without the customary distance he built into everything. She turned.

"For what it's worth," Callum said, standing at the bottom of the stairs with his tie already loosened, looking less like the man who ran an empire and more like someone standing at the edge of a decision he hadn't fully made yet, "I'm glad it's you. Whatever else this is."

She didn't have an answer for that either. She went up to bed and lay awake a long time, listening to the unfamiliar sounds of a house that was now, on paper, half hers.

She woke at two in the morning to voices downstairs.

Not raised — worse than raised. Low, and furious, and painfully familiar. Wren lay still for a moment, telling herself to stay in bed, that whatever was happening below her had nothing to do with her, that she'd married into a business arrangement and business arrangements didn't require her to care who Callum Vance let into his house on his wedding night.

She got up anyway.

She found them in the kitchen — Seraphine, still in the black dress she'd worn to the ceremony, mascara smudged in a way that suggested she'd been crying somewhere between the church and here. Callum stood across the island from her, jacket gone, exactly as undone as Wren had left him at the base of the stairs.

"You can't keep doing this," Callum was saying, quiet and raw. "Not tonight. Not on my—"

"Your wedding night." Seraphine's laugh was jagged, nothing like the composed woman from the elevator. "Say it. You can say it, Callum, I already know."

"Sera—"

"I waited eleven years for you to choose something other than the company. Eleven years." Her voice cracked on the number. "And you married a stranger instead."

Wren stood frozen in the doorway, unseen by either of them, watching Callum's face do something she'd never once seen it do in three months of studying it for a living — crumple, just slightly, just for a second, before he caught himself and smoothed it back into place.

"She's not a stranger," he said. "Not anymore."

Something about the way he said it — quiet, almost surprised at himself — made Seraphine go very still.

She turned, and found Wren standing in the doorway, and for a moment the three of them stood frozen in the low kitchen light, none of them speaking, all of them understanding at once that whatever had just been said couldn't be unsaid.

"Well," Seraphine said finally, straightening, gathering the shredded pieces of her composure back around herself with visible effort. "That answers that question, doesn't it."

She picked up her coat from the back of a chair and walked past Wren without another word, and a moment later the front door closed hard enough to rattle the glass in its frame.

Callum didn't move. Wren didn't either. They stood on opposite sides of the kitchen island, wedding rings still unfamiliar on both their hands, and neither one of them said a single word about what either of them had just heard.