His Substitute Bride

Two Names

The marriage certificate said Stella Grant.

I'd signed my sister's name in the church, in front of God and a hundred and fifty witnesses, with a pen that cost more than my rent. The ink was still wet when the organ struck up the recessional and Damian Black took my arm — my arm, not hers, though his eyes had never once dropped to the dress, or the veil, or the hands that weren't my sister's.

He led me down the aisle like he'd been doing it for years.

The reception was a blur of champagne and strangers who kissed my cheek and called me by the wrong name. Mrs. Black. Stella. Darling. The caterers knew. The photographer knew — he kept angling for shots of my profile, the one where the veil hid the differences. The Black family knew. His mother, a woman with iron-gray hair and eyes like winter, looked at me once, looked away, and never looked again.

I smiled until my face ached.

And then it was over. The last guest left. The lights went down. The car idled at the curb, black and silent, and Damian Black opened the door for me like we were the only two people in the world.

The drive to his house took forty minutes.

He didn't speak. Not once. He sat on the other side of the back seat, looking out the window at the city going by, and I sat in my sister's dress with my sister's name on my lips and tried not to think about what came next.

His house was a mansion. Of course it was. Iron gates, a gravel drive, a front door that opened before we reached it, a housekeeper with a kind face who took one look at me and said, "Welcome home, Mrs. Black."

Mrs. Black, I thought. Stella Black. The woman who ran.

"Your room is the east wing," the housekeeper said. "I've had the bed turned down. If you need anything at all —"

"Thank you," I said. "Elena."

She blinked. "I — yes. How did you —"

"Your name's on the mail table," I said. "I have good eyes. It's what I do."

Elena looked at me for a moment. Then she smiled, small and real. "Good eyes," she repeated. "I'll remember that."

The east wing was a suite. Bigger than the apartment I shared with Stella, bigger than our parents' house, with a bed the size of a small country and windows that looked out over a garden I couldn't see in the dark.

I stood in the middle of it, in my sister's dress, and waited.

I didn't know what I was waiting for. A knock. An explanation. The other shoe.

The other shoe came at eleven.

A key turned in the lock — my door, my room, a key I didn't have — and Damian Black walked in, still in his suit, tie loosened, looking like a man who'd made a decision.

I stood up. My heart was pounding, but I held still, the way you hold still for a horse that might spook.

"Stella," he said.

The room went very quiet.

He was looking at me — at the dress, at the veil I'd taken off but not put away, at the woman in his bedroom — and he said, "Stella."

Not Sofia. Not the name he'd used in the church, the one that had made my stomach drop with something I didn't want to name.

Stella.

I could have said it. I could have said, I'm not her, you know that, you said my name at the altar, you know. I could have thrown his words back at him, the "Hello, Sofia" that had meant something, or nothing, or everything.

Instead, I heard myself say, very quietly: "It's late. You should sleep."

He looked at me for a long moment. His eyes were dark, and tired, and I couldn't read a single thing in them.

"Sleep," he repeated. "Yes."

He turned and left.

The door clicked shut behind him.

I stood in the middle of the room for a long time, in my sister's dress, and I thought about the two names.

In the church, he'd called me Sofia. Here, alone, he'd called me Stella.

One of those was the truth. One of them was the lie.

I didn't know which.

The room, I noticed, had been prepared with care. Someone had folded a robe at the foot of the bed, put fresh flowers on the dresser — white lilies, which meant someone had ordered them, because nobody buys lilies for a bride who might cry. There was a book on the nightstand. A current bestseller, the kind you buy for a guest you don't know well enough to pick a real gift for. And a phone charger, still wrapped in its plastic.

The housekeeper had thought of everything.

That was the strangest thing about the whole night, in the end. Not the wrong name. Not the man who'd walked out without a word. But the fact that somewhere in this house, someone had set out lilies and a charger and a robe for a woman they'd never met — as if they'd known, before I did, that I was coming.

I didn't know which of the two names was the truth. But I knew the room had been waiting for someone.

For me?

Or for the bride who was supposed to be standing here?

I didn't sleep.

At two in the morning I stopped pretending and got up, found the bathroom, washed my sister's makeup off my face until the woman in the mirror looked like me again. My own face. My own eyes. The scar on my eyebrow from the time Stella pushed me off the swing when we were six and never said sorry because she was crying harder than I was.

My sister.

Where are you, Stella?

The note said don't come looking. The note said I'll be safe. The note said I'll explain everything, I swear.

But my sister had never once in her life let me take a fall for her. She'd been the older one, the brave one, the one who'd told our father to leave me alone when I spent the rent money on paint. She'd stood between me and every bad thing that ever came for our family.

And now she'd run, leaving me to marry the man she was afraid of.

Unless she wasn't afraid of him, a voice said. Unless she was running from something else. Something closer. Something she couldn't tell you.

I didn't know. I had a sister somewhere out there, a husband I didn't know in the room down the hall, and a marriage certificate with the wrong name on it.

I sat on the floor of the bathroom, in my own face, and I made myself a promise:

You wanted Stella. You got me. And I'm going to find out why.