I opened my mouth to say yes, to say she looked nice, to say whatever hollow word would get me through the next ten minutes so I could leave and go sit in my car and stare at nothing the way I’d been doing every night for weeks. But the word didn’t come. What came instead was Andrea’s face. Not a memory I chose, not a thought I invited. Her face, sharp and sudden, the dimple on the right side, the green eyes, the way she looked at me the morning after she stayed over for the first time, sleep-rumpled in my kitchen wearing my shirt, sauce on her lip from the pasta she’d burned the night before. She was laughing about a three-legged cat and I was standing at the counter watching her and I remember thinkingthis is it, this is what people mean when they talk about the rest of their life.
The image shattered against the reality of where I was. A bridal shop. A woman in white who wasn’t her. A wedding I’d agreed to because my mother cried in a hospital bed.
What the fuck am I doing?
The thought was so clear it cut through everything else. The guilt, the duty, the months of numbness. What the fuck am I doing sitting in a velvet chair watching a woman I don’t love try on a dress for a wedding I don’t want while the woman I can’t stop thinking about is gone because I was too much of a coward to fight for her? My mother was sick, yes. But she was getting treatment. The healers were with her. She could live months, maybe longer, and I hadn’t even tried to tell her the truth. I hadn’t told her Andrea was my fated mate, hadn’t given her the chance to understand what she was actually asking me to give up. I just said okay and broke Andrea’s heart because saying no to my mother felt impossible, and now I was sitting in a bridal shop paying the price for my own cowardice.
What the fuck am I doing?
My vision tunneled. I gripped the armrests hard enough that the wood groaned under my hands.
“I need to go.”
Lorraine’s smile froze. “Excuse me?”
“I need to leave.” I was already standing, my legs moving before the decision fully formed, my body making the choice my brain had been too paralyzed to make for weeks.
“Finneas, I’m in a wedding dress. You can’t just walk out.”
“I’m sorry.”
I was past the champagne table, past the mirrors, through the front door before she finished saying my name. Her voice followed me into the parking lot, high and sharp, and her mother’s voice underneath it, cutting, furious. I didn’t process any of it because my hands were shaking so badly I couldn’t get my keys out of my pocket.
I sat in the car with my forehead against the steering wheel. My chest was cracking open, not with grief this time but with clarity, brutal and overdue. I couldn’t do this. I could not stand at an altar with a woman who made me feel nothing while Andrea was somewhere in the world without me. I couldn’t spend a lifetime faking warmth I didn’t have to give. Whatever I owed my mother, whatever guilt she’d loaded onto my shoulders since I was twenty-four, it wasn’t worth this. Nothing was worth this.
I started the car and drove to my mother’s estate.
The housekeeper met me in the foyer and something about her face was wrong. Not worried. Caught. She had the expression of a person standing in front of a door they didn’t want opened.
“She’s resting upstairs, sir. Maybe you could come back this after...”
I was already past her, taking the stairs two at a time.
Margaret’s bedroom door was open. I walked in and stopped.
The bed was made. Not slept-in-and-tidied made. Hotel-crisp, pillow-fluffed, not-been-used-in-days made. The monitors that had flanked the bed for weeks were pushed against the far wallwith their cords wrapped neatly around the stands. Unplugged. The IV pole was folded in the corner. The room smelled like lemon polish and open windows, not antiseptic, not the stale flower water that had been sitting on the nightstand for weeks.
I stood in the doorway looking at the empty bed and something cold settled into my stomach, slow, heavy, the way ice forms on still water.
I went downstairs, through the back doors, down the gravel path to the garden. My mother maintained the rose section herself, had since before my father died, the one part of the estate she wouldn’t let the gardeners touch.
She was there. Standing upright in a pressed blouse and slacks, her dark hair styled, full makeup. She was holding gardening shears, clipping roses, bending to examine lower branches and straightening without a trace of difficulty. The woman who had gripped my hand from a hospital bed last week, too weak to sit up, tears streaming down her gray face, was standing in her garden with color in her cheeks and precision in her hands looking like she could run a marathon.
She turned and saw me and the color left her face so fast I could track it draining from her cheeks to her throat.
“Finneas.” She set the shears down too carefully. “What a surprise.”
“You look recovered.”
“The fresh air helps. The doctor said...”
“When did you leave the hospital bed?”
“I have good days and...”
“When did you stop being sick, Mother?”
She didn’t answer. Her eyes moved across the garden, quick, calculating, and I recognized the look because I’d seen it my entire life. Margaret Kingsley assessing the situation, choosing her angle, deciding which version of herself to present. I’d just never been on the receiving end of it with my eyes open.
