Second Choice

The Call

Imogen Ashworth

Nathaniel gathered the entire family in the living room at nine that night, and Imogen knew before he said a single word that whatever came next would change something none of them could undo.

She sat on the edge of the couch beside Celeste, who was scrolling through her phone with the mild boredom of someone expecting another lecture about attendance at charity events. Diane stood near the fireplace, arms crossed, watching Nathaniel pace the length of the rug like a man rehearsing a speech he still hadn’t decided how to give.

“Dad, if this is about the gala seating chart again, I already fixed it,” Celeste said without looking up.

“It’s not about the gala.” Nathaniel stopped pacing and faced them, hands clasped behind his back in the stance he used for board meetings, not family dinners. “I need everyone’s full attention. This is important.”

Diane’s arms tightened across her chest.

“Nathaniel, you’re scaring me.”

“I don’t mean to scare anyone. I mean to be honest, for once, before this gets ahead of me.”

Imogen’s stomach dropped, remembering the phone call from that morning, the way her father’s voice had shifted the second he heard the words Cross Industries. She’d spent the whole day turning that memory over, trying to convince herself it meant nothing beyond ordinary business.

“Dad,” she said carefully, “does this have to do with this morning?”

Nathaniel’s eyes flicked to her, surprised, then resigned, like he’d hoped to control how this information reached the room and had just lost that control in a single sentence.

“Yes,” he said. “It does.”

Celeste finally looked up from her phone. “What happened this morning?”

“Ashworth Group is in trouble,” Nathaniel said, and the words landed in the room like something physical. “More trouble than any of you realize. We’ve been managing appearances for longer than I’d like to admit, but the truth is our position has weakened significantly over the last two years.”

“How significantly,” Diane asked, voice suddenly very quiet.

“Significantly enough that without intervention, we could lose the company within eighteen months.”

The room went silent except for the low hum of the heating system, and Imogen felt every eye in the family turn briefly toward her, an old reflex, the unspoken assumption that whatever numbers had gone wrong somehow traced back to her side of the business. She kept her face still and said nothing.

“There’s a solution,” Nathaniel continued.

“Cross Industries has expressed serious interest in a merger. Their infrastructure, their capital, combined with our design and manufacturing strength, could stabilize us completely. More than stabilize us. It could make us stronger than we’ve ever been.”

“That’s good news,” Celeste said slowly, though her tone carried the wariness of someone waiting for the part that wasn’t.

“Isn’t it?”

“It could be. There’s a condition.”

“What kind of condition?”

Nathaniel hesitated, and Imogen watched her father, a man who negotiated seven figure contracts without blinking, struggle to find the right words for what came next.

“The Cross family trust has a clause,” he said finally. “For alliances of this size, historically, they’ve required more than a business agreement. They require a personal one.”

Diane’s face went pale. “Nathaniel, what are you saying.”

“I’m saying the merger is conditional on a marriage between our families.”

For a moment nobody spoke. Celeste’s phone slid from her hand onto the couch cushion, forgotten entirely.

“A marriage,” Celeste repeated, like the word itself needed testing before she could believe it was real. “You mean an actual wedding. Between one of us and someone from the Cross family.”

“Yes.”

“Between me and who exactly?”

Nathaniel’s silence stretched a beat too long, and Imogen felt her own pulse pick up without understanding why yet, some instinct warning her that whatever came next mattered more than the rest of this conversation combined.

“Gabriel Cross,” he said finally.

The name hit Imogen like something physical, though she kept her expression carefully blank, years of practice at hiding what she felt in front of this family finally paying off in a moment she desperately needed it to.

“Gabriel Cross,” Celeste said, testing the name slowly, and something shifted across her face, an old memory surfacing that Imogen didn’t fully understand yet.

“He proposed to me. Years ago.”

“I remember,” Diane said quietly.

“You said no,” Nathaniel added, gently, like he was trying not to reopen an old wound while also needing to reference it directly. “I never asked why, and I respected that at the time. But he’s renewing the offer now, given the circumstances, and I need you to understand what’s actually at stake if you say no again.”

“You want me to marry him,” Celeste said.

“To save the company.”

“I want you to consider it. I would never force this on you.

“But if I don’t.”

Nathaniel didn’t answer that directly, and the silence that followed said more than any explanation could have. Celeste looked down at her hands, something calculating moving behind her eyes that Imogen recognized from childhood, the same expression her sister wore whenever she was weighing a decision against how it would look rather than how it would feel.

“When does he need an answer,” Celeste asked.

“Soon. The board wants this finalized within the month if it’s happening at all.”

Imogen sat perfectly still through all of it, hands folded in her lap, doing the math on numbers that had nothing to do with quarterly reports. Gabriel Cross. The name meant nothing to her on its own, no face attached, no memory to pull it toward. She told herself that was exactly right. She told herself there was no reason a stranger’s name from a business conversation should feel like anything at all.

“I need time to think,” Celeste said finally, standing from the couch, phone forgotten on the cushion behind her.

“This isn’t a small thing you’re asking, Dad.”

“I know that.”

“I need tonight. At least tonight.”

She left the room without waiting for a response, footsteps quick and controlled on the stairs, and Diane followed a moment later, murmuring something about giving her daughter space that didn’t quite mask the worry in her voice. Nathaniel exhaled slowly once they’d gone, some of the tension leaving his shoulders now that the hardest part of the announcement was behind him.

“Imogen,” he said, “I’ll need your help managing the details, whatever she decides. Discreetly, of course.”

“Of course,” Imogen said automatically, though her mind was still snagged on the name, on the strange, unplaceable unease it had left behind, like a word on the tip of her tongue she couldn’t quite retrieve.

“Thank you,” Nathaniel said, already turning to leave, already moving on to whatever came next in his mental list of crises to manage tonight.

Imogen sat alone in the living room long after everyone else had gone, staring at nothing, turning the name over and over in her mind. Gabriel Cross. She didn’t know him. She was certain of that. And yet something in her, some quiet, insistent instinct she couldn’t explain, refused to accept it as easily as the rest of her tried to.

She was still sitting there, phone forgotten in her lap, when a single text came through from an unknown number, one she didn’t recognize and had no reason to expect.

I think we’re about to become family. I’d like to know your name properly this time.

Imogen stared at the screen, heart suddenly loud in her own ears, and felt the entire evening tilt sideways beneath her.