"I didn't grow up in your world. I grew up in a two-bedroom apartment in Queens where my dad fixed the dishwasher with duct tape and my mom grew tomatoes on the fire escape. I didn't know what a benefit gala was until you took me to one, and I'm still not totally sure I know which fork is for salad." More laughter. She blinked hard. "But I know what love looks like. I saw it every day growing up. It looks like showing up. It looks like paying attention. It looks like my dad bringing my mom coffee every single morning for thirty-one years without being asked."
Her voice broke. She let it.
"I didn't expect you. I wasn't looking for you. I backed into you and ruined your shirt." She was crying now, freely, and she didn't care. "And you looked at me like I was a person, not a disaster zone, and you caught my drink before it hit the ground, and you remembered that I like peonies, and you — you saw me. In a room full of people who were smarter and richer and more put together, you sawme."
She looked up from the paper. The rest she knew by heart.
"I don't have a dynasty to offer you. I don't have a portfolio or a family name or connections. I have a classroom full of nine-year-olds who think I hung the moon, and a best friend who'll fight anyone who hurts me, and a heart that is completely, terrifyingly, irrevocably yours." She took a breath. "I choose you, Dominic. Today and tomorrow and every day I'm lucky enough to get. I choose you."
Silence. Then applause: warm, genuine, a few guests dabbing their eyes. Charlotte's mother was openly sobbing. Kate, behind her, sniffed hard.
Charlotte looked at Dominic.
His eyes were wet. It was like something had cracked in him during her words. She could see it, the line running through his composure. He was looking at her with an expression she'd never seen before. Raw. Unarmored. Almost frightened.
She thought:There he is. That's him. That's the man I love.
He blinked and the expression was gone. Sealed over. He squeezed her hand.
The officiant turned to Dominic. "And now, Dominic, your vows."
Standard vows. They'd discussed it: she'd written personal ones and he'd said he preferred the traditional version. She'd said of course, whatever he wanted, and she'd meant it. Not everyone was comfortable being vulnerable in public. It didn't mean the feelings weren't there.
The officiant fed him the lines. Dominic repeated them. His voice was steady, measured.
"I, Dominic, take you?—"
He stopped.
The silence opened like a crack in the floor.
His mouth was still shaped around a word. His eyes were on hers, but they weren't.
Charlotte's fingers tightened on his.
He closed his eyes. Opened them. And when he spoke, the name that came out of his mouth was not hers.
"— Jacqueline."
CHAPTER 4
CHARLOTTE
The word hung in the air like smoke.
Jacqueline.
Charlotte heard it and didn't hear it. Her brain took the sound and turned it over, slowly, examining it from every angle, trying to understand what it was before you registered that it had cut you.
Jacqueline.
Not Charlotte. Not Charlie. Not any version of her name.
Jacqueline.
The silence in the ballroom was total. Three hundred people holding their breath at once, the collective intake creating a vacuum that swallowed the string quartet, the ambient hum of the air conditioning, the rustle of programs… and left nothing. Nothing except Dominic's face, which had gone the color of ash, and his mouth, which was already forming new words, rushing to cover the wound he'd just opened in front of everyone.
"Charlotte — I meant Charlotte — I?—"
