On Our Wedding, I Married His Rival

Chapter 3

Brandon hid the phone behind his back. "T-Tessa—"

I looked at them. "Ceremony starts in three minutes. What are you all doing hiding out here? Three hundred people out there—you want them waiting, or laughing at us?"

The second I said it, they cracked up.

"Tessa, come on," Jason waved, still grinning. "Three minutes? Ethan's not that fast. He can't—"

"Enough." I cut in, calm, and turned to go.

Brandon remembered the call was still live and glanced at the screen. "Ethan, she says three minutes, move it."

Ethan's low laugh came through, lazy in the afterglow. "Three minutes? Does she have some kind of wrong idea about me?"

A woman's soft giggle drifted through the speaker, murmuring something.

"Ethan," Brandon tried, "so—"

Two seconds of quiet, then Ethan's impatient voice. "Go. Hold it down. I'll be there when I'm done." On done, the woman cooed again in the background.

Brandon hung up fast. They stubbed out their cigarettes, straightened their jackets, and filed off the terrace.

Catching up to me, Jason muttered, "Tessa, all these years, we know how it is with you two. He's got you in his heart, it's just—guys, you know how it is."

I didn't look at him. Didn't answer.

Truth is, until yesterday I hadn't wanted to believe his eye had started to wander either.

Wendy is my enemy. We've gone at it for years; she's always had to come out on top. She went after Ethan not out of love—but because he was mine, and taking him meant she got to watch me hurt, watch me lose.

At the launch party, the moment they met, something shifted in his eyes. I told myself I was imagining it. Ten years in—if I didn't know him, I'd never have held on this long. So all those blurry moments, those late-night texts he never answered, I chose to believe him. I refused to believe that the two of us, who'd survived the worst and were finally building something, would lose to Wendy.

But he got tired of the mask, got bolder by the day. Stopped hiding. Started letting me catch him on purpose. Then dressed the betrayal up as a gift. "I'm this good—you really expected me to have just one woman? But my heart's yours. Nobody sits in the wife's seat but you." And expected gratitude.

Vera was right. He played it deep. So deep he didn't peel off the last layer until the day before the wedding. Using the cruelest possible method—making me see it with my own eyes, hear it with my own ears, exactly what I was to him. Playing it out until I had nowhere to go.

"Tessa, take your time down the aisle, we've got you."

"Yeah, Ethan said the second he's done he'll be here—just go through the motions."

They thought I was going through the motions. Thought I'd walk the aisle alone in my veil, stand in front of the priest, and wait for a groom who might never come. Then smile and say I do to empty air.

That was the script Ethan left me.

The groomsmen flanked me, still wearing that everything's-handled smile. The cathedral doors swung open.

A man stood there, cut out against the light.

And every smile in the room froze.