The Wedding
I forgot my coat at Vivian’s house, which was how I learned that my fiancé was planning to murder me.
The irony would have been funny if it weren’t so precise. If I had remembered that coat, I would have driven home through the evening traffic, reviewed the prenuptial agreement over wine, and married a man I was about to discover was willing to kill me for the company my father built. Instead, I turned back, and the universe, for once, arranged itself clearly enough that I could read it.
Vivian Hale’s study door was half closed. I had not meant to eavesdrop. I had only meant to retrieve my coat from the library closet and leave before the conversation in the other room could follow me home. But the voices stopped me. My fiancé’s voice. Soft. Comfortable. Like he was discussing a golf tournament instead of a murder.
“She’s suspicious,” Vivian said. Her voice had that particular quality it took on when she was calculating something. We had spent the evening together, she and I, drinking champagne beneath those imported Venetian chandeliers she mentioned every time I visited. She had kissed my cheek. She had called me the daughter she always wanted. “Marriage requires trust, Claire,” she had said when I told her I wanted to review the revised prenuptial agreement myself. As if trust meant not reading things before you signed them. As if love meant surrendering your own judgment.
I stepped closer to the cracked door.
“Claire thinks being a corporate attorney makes her brilliant,” Ethan said, and I heard him laugh. That laugh. The one I had fallen asleep listening to for the past year. “Once we’re married, she’ll relax. She’ll sign the company shares over, and we’ll figure out the rest.”
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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