CHAPTER TWO

EVELYN

The morning of my wedding arrived like it had somewhere better to be. Too fast and bright. Too full of other people's joy.

I sat in the white silk chair in front of the mirror while my makeup artist worked around me with the quiet confidence of someone who had made many brides beautiful. Brushes moved across my cheekbones. Someone adjusted my veil. One of my little bridesmaids shrieked with laughter in the corner, and the sound of it, pure and unaware, loosened something in my chest.

Children knew nothing about the past. Lucky them.

"You look stunning," Mia said from beside me.

I looked at my reflection.

The woman in the mirror was dressed for a love story. White gown, delicate lace at the collar, hair swept up the way I had always imagined. She looked exactly the way a bride should look.

I just couldn't figure out if she was happy.

"Mia." I kept my voice low so only she could hear.

She leaned closer. "Yeah?"

"He messaged me again last night."

Her hand, which had been adjusting a pin in my hair, went still.

"How many times?" she asked.

"Three messages. Different numbers each time."

She straightened up. Looked at me in the mirror. Her face was calm in the careful way that meant she was working hard to keep it that way. "It's a troll, Eve. Someone jealous of your happiness. Don't let them.."

"Mia." I turned to look at her directly. "It's not a troll."

The silence that followed lasted only two seconds.

But two seconds was enough to see the thing that flickered behind her eyes.

Recognition..She blinked it away so fast I almost missed it.

"You don't know that," she said quietly.

"The messages are too specific." I turned back to the mirror. "They know my name. They know about the wedding. One said 'Let's see how long that lasts.' The last one said 'Tick tock.'"

Mia said nothing.

Outside, music floated in from the hall, the decorator doing a final sound check. Someone laughed, Glasses clinked.

"Let's get you married first," Mia said finally. "Everything else after."

I nodded..I let the makeup artist finish. I let the girls fuss over my dress. I let the photographer take forty-seven pictures before I was allowed to breathe. I let the morning carry me forward, because stopping meant thinking, and thinking meant remembering, and remembering meant him.

* * *

The doors of the hall opened. And the whole world went white. White flowers cascading from the ceiling. White ribbons coiled around the pillars. A Thousand Years playing softly from somewhere I couldn't see, the notes rising and falling like a prayer. Faces turning toward me, smiling, crying, whispering.

I walked.

One step. Two. Three. Oscar stood at the altar.

He was watching me with the kind of expression men spent their whole lives trying to hide, open, undone, grateful. Like I was something he hadn't deserved but had been given anyway. For one long moment, I let myself believe in this completely. In him, in us, in the clean white morning of it.

We reached each other. The ceremony began.

"Do you, Evelyn Williams, take Oscar James as your lawfully wedded husband?"

"I do." The words came easily. I meant them.

Vows were spoken. Rings were slid onto fingers. Applause rose from the crowd like a wave. Mia was wiping her eyes in the front row, shoulders shaking, and seeing her like that, so undone by my happiness, made my own eyes sting.

"You may kiss the bride," the officiant said.

Oscar stepped forward, his hand warm against the small of my back.

I closed my eyes.

And then..

"Excuse me."

The voice was quiet.

But it landed in the hall the way a stone lands in still water, not loud, just impossibly heavy, sending circles outward until everything was disturbed.

I opened my eyes. The hall had gone silent.

I turned. He stood at the entrance.

Taller than I remembered. Older, sharper, with the kind of presence that rooms rearranged themselves around. He was dressed all in black, and he wore it like armor. Not the expensive kind that keeps you safe, the kind that tells the world it never needed to be.

His eyes found mine immediately. Like he had walked into this room already knowing exactly where I would be standing.

Eden Blackwood.

The whispers started almost immediately.

"Is that — "

"Eden Blackwood? The CEO —"

"At a wedding? He never comes to —"

"I heard he doesn't even do public events —"

I could not move. I could not speak. My whole body had made a decision without consulting me, it had simply stopped, like a clock that someone had put their hand over.

Seven years. Seven years, and he walked in like no time had passed at all. Like I was not standing in a wedding gown.

Like I did not belong to someone else.

* * *

What he did next was the cruelest kind of clever. He walked down the aisle like a man who owned the room, unhurried, unashamed and stopped in front of Oscar.

"Forgive the interruption," he said, and his voice was warm, charming, completely at ease. "I came to bring a gift."

He opened a briefcase. Documents, sleek and formal, stamped with the Prada insignia. "Oscar James," he said. "I'd like to offer you a global ambassadorship."

The hall erupted.

Gasps. Actual gasps.

"He never does endorsements.."

"Prada's youngest CEO .."

"Oscar James? Seriously?"

I watched my husband's face, because he was my husband now, or close enough, watched the disbelief melt into something bright and hungry. Watched him reach for the pen before the surprise had even finished crossing his face.

He signed. And Eden stepped back, smiling softly, and let the applause swallow everything.

He had just

bought himself a seat at my wedding.

And Oscar had let him in..