“Oh.” His face falls slightly, but he recovers quickly. “Of course you are. All the good ones are taken.” He glances at my left hand, where Ben’s ring catches the morning sunlight. “Lucky guy.”
“Thank you.”
“Well, it was worth a shot. Your fiancé is a fortunate man.” Brett shoulders his water bottle and gives me one last charming smile. “Enjoy the rest of your run, Freya. Maybe I’ll see you around the park again.”
After he jogs away, I sit on the bench feeling more alone than ever. Even when attractive strangers ask me out, all I can think about is Ben. Even when I’m trying to run away from my problems, I’m wearing his ring.
And the most terrifying part is that I can’t imagine this feeling ever going away.
What happens after we divorce in a year? Will I finally be able to move on, to date other people, to fall in love with someone who will love me back? Or will I spend the rest of my life comparing every man to Ben Lawlor, finding them all lacking?
Will I be forty years old, still single, still hung up on the man I fake-married when I was thirty-two?
The thought is enough to make me want to start running again, to sprint until my legs give out and I collapse somewhere farfrom Chicago and wedding dresses and the impossible situation I’ve created for myself.
Instead, I pull out my phone and scroll through my contacts, stopping at Bella’s name. I could call her right now. I could confess everything—the fake engagement, the real feelings, the way I’m slowly falling apart four days before my own wedding. Bella would listen. She’d probably even try to help.
But she’d also be hurt that I’ve been lying to her for months. She’d be confused about why I agreed to this in the first place. And she’d want to fix things, the way she’s always wanted to fix things for me, but this isn’t something that can be fixed with sisterly advice and emotional support.
This is something I have to figure out on my own.
I put the phone away and stand up from the bench. I need to go home, shower, and pretend to be excited about final wedding preparations. I need to call the caterer and confirm the vegetarian options. I need to try on my dress one more time to make sure the alterations are perfect.
I need to stop thinking about backing out and start accepting that I’m going to go through with this, no matter how much it hurts.
Because the alternative—disappointing Ben, ruining his business deal, explaining to everyone why I changed my mind at the last minute—seems even worse than marrying the man I love and pretending it doesn’t mean anything.
As I walk back toward the park entrance, I pass Brett again, now cooling down near the running path. He waves, and I wave back, both of us knowing that in another life, without engagementrings and fake fiancés and hopelessly complicated feelings, we might have had that coffee.
But this isn’t another life. This is the life where I fell in love with my best friend and agreed to help him stage the perfect fake marriage, not realizing that the only person I’d be fooling would be myself.
Four more days.
Four more days until I promise to love Ben Lawlor forever, knowing that I already do, and that it will never be enough.
CHAPTER 21
BEN
The suit fitting appointment is at three o’clock downtown, at a boutique that people are known to fly to hours from out of town. My father insisted on coming along, claiming he wanted to be involved in wedding preparations since he’d missed out on so much of my life being busy with work.
The irony of that statement isn’t lost on me.
“Mr. Lawlor?” The tailor, a thin man with careful hands and an Italian accent, gestures toward the fitting rooms. “If you’d like to try on the suit, we can make any final adjustments.”
I disappear into the changing room and pull on the charcoal gray suit. It fits perfectly—the jacket tailored precisely to my shoulders, the pants hemmed to the exact right length. When I step out to look in the three-way mirror, I look exactly like what I am: a successful businessman about to make the most important deal of his career.
“Very handsome,” my father says from where he’s sitting in one of the leather chairs, scrolling through his phone. “Freya will be impressed.”
Will she? I wonder. Or will she see what everyone else sees—a man in an expensive suit, playing a role he’s convinced himself he deserves?
“The fit is excellent,” the tailor says, making small marks with chalk where minute adjustments might be needed. “We’ll have this ready for pickup Friday morning.”
“Perfect,” I say, though nothing about this feels perfect. “I’ll send my assistant.”
After I change back into my regular clothes, my father suggests we grab coffee at a place around the corner. I’m surprised. We rarely spend time together without a specific agenda, and even more rarely do we talk about anything personal. Then again, he’s been in town all week and maybe he’s bored and needs something to do.
The coffee shop is one of those generic chains full of people working on laptops. We find a table near the window, and my father removes his phone from the table entirely—something I can’t remember him ever doing during our conversations.
