As Rachel and I left the store, sunlight warm on my face, I realized something important. For the first time since everything started unraveling, I wasn’t choosing out of fear.
I was choosing because I could.
Whatever came next—scandals, tests, truths, fallout—I would face it standing up.
I had to, because how I handled it mattered to me.
Then Rachel said, “Now we need to get shoes and jewelry.” At my groan, she just laughed. “This is the easy part. Wait until we get ready the day of.”
“What?” But Rachel didn’t respond to my panicked little outburst, she just strode on to the car dragging me with her. “Bossy bitch,” I muttered and Rachel just grinned.
“You love me for it and you know it.” Then she glanced at the garment bag I was hanging in the back seat and added,completely smug, “Also, I just saved you from a lifetime of regrettable photos.”
Another laugh escaped me, because yeah, that was the thing: I did love her for it.
Chapter
Twenty-Six
FRANKIE
The waiting was worse than the fear.
I hadn’t expected that. I thought the fear would be the thing that hollowed me out—the possibility, the what if, the wordsiblingsechoing in places I didn’t want it to exist. But fear, at least, had edges. It flared. It burned. It receded.
Waiting just… sat there.
It followed me through the house, through conversations, through the quiet moments when I thought I was finally alone with my own thoughts and realized I wasn’t. Not really. It was there in the pauses, in the way my chest tightened whenever Archie walked into a room, in the way my body reacted to him before my brain could catch up and remind me that this might all be wrong.
Thatwemight be wrong.
I was in my room that afternoon, sitting cross-legged on the bed with my laptop open and absolutely no idea what I was pretending to work on, when a soft knock sounded at the door.
I knew it was Archie before he spoke.
“Babe?”
My pulse kicked.
“Yeah,” I said, and closed the laptop like it had offended me.
He stepped inside and shut the door behind him, slower than usual. Deliberate. His shoulders were tense, jaw set—not angry, just… braced. Like he was walking into something he couldn’t control.
That made my stomach drop.
“What’s wrong?” I asked immediately.
He shook his head once. “Nothing’s wrong. I just—” He stopped, ran a hand through his hair, then looked straight at me. “I need to tell you something.”
I slid off the bed, suddenly unable to sit still. “Okay.”
He didn’t rush it. Archie never did when something mattered. He took a breath, grounding himself, and then said it.
“I arranged the DNA test.”
The words hit like a sudden drop in elevation.
“Oh,” I said.
