They Chose the Wrong Daughter novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: A Toast to the Bride

At the welcome dinner Gerard toasts her return and her engagement to Nolan Askew, signed when she was seven. Nolan walks in.

I locked myself in the bathroom off the front hall and called Fergus.

It rang until it went to the recording of his cough.

I tried my second next, and he told me the shipment was loaded and nobody had followed me.

That was good news, and it was all the good news I got.

I came out and let Clem walk me into the dining room.

The table was set for sixty, with gold-rimmed plates and candles as thick as my wrist.

My seat was at my father's right hand.

I watched a waiter fill my glass from a decanter.

When he turned his back, I poured the wine into a flower vase and then picked up the water jug.

Nobody saw me do it, except maybe Clem, who looked at the vase and then at me and smiled.

"Water's safer," she whispered. "The wine is awful."

I filled my own plate from the common dishes, after three other guests had taken from them.

My mother watched every forkful.

"You're thin," she said. "Did they feed you at that place?"

"They fed me fine," I said.

"Fergus Rainey is a smuggler," my father said, loud enough for the whole table. "Everybody here knows what he is."

"Everybody here knows what you are," I said. "I was raised in the same trade."

A union boss coughed into his napkin.

My father laughed it off and tapped a spoon against his glass.

The room went quiet.

"Friends," he said. "Nineteen years ago I lost my daughter. Tonight she is home."

The guests clapped, and my mother cried openly, and I kept my eyes on my father's hands.

"But a family's work is never done," he said. "Tonight I have one more piece of joy."

He put a hand on my shoulder.

"Rosalind is engaged."

I did not move.

"When she was seven, I signed a contract with the Askew family to end the war," he said. "Our daughter for their son. One wedding, and the docks belong to both houses."

The clapping started again, slower this time.

A few guests looked at their plates.

They had known about the contract, every one of them.

I stood up.

"Raise your hand if you knew I was a bride before I was a daughter," I said.

Nobody raised a hand.

The harbor commissioner studied his dessert fork, and the judge studied the ceiling.

My father said my name through his teeth, and I sat down again.

"You signed me away," I said, "when I was seven."

"We had to end the bloodshed," my father said, and his voice cracked in a way I could hear was practiced. "Nobody knew you'd be taken."

My mother grabbed my hand under the table.

"We never stopped looking," she said. "I swear it."

I looked at her fingers, and they were cold and shaking.

I did not pull my hand away.

On my other side, Clem leaned in, and her eyes were wet again.

"I know it's a lot," she said. "Dad was going to send me, if you never came back. I'd have done it. It's what a family does."

"They'd have taken you?" I asked.

"They wanted blood," she said, and shrugged. "I'm not blood."

It was gracious and sad and exactly what a decent sister would say.

I put a piece of bread in my mouth so I would not say anything else.

"I'd like to read the contract," I said instead.

"Of course," my father said. "Tomorrow, with the lawyer."

"Now," I said.

He blinked.

"The groom will want to meet you first," he said. "He is a good man. A bit severe, but good."

"He's coming here?" I asked.

My father looked at the doors.

"He's been invited."

I set down my fork.

"You invited a man I have never met to my homecoming and told sixty people I'm marrying him before you asked me."

"It's a formality," my father said. "It was decided before you were born."

"Before I was seven," I said. "You said seven."

For the first time, he did not have an answer.

The front doors opened at the far end of the hall.

A tall man in a charcoal suit stood in the frame with four men behind him.

He was in his thirties, dark-haired, and he had a scar across the back of his left hand.

Every guest in the room went silent.

He looked down the long table past the candles and the judge and the harbor commissioner, and he found me.

"Nolan Askew," my father said, and stood. "Right on time."

The man did not smile.

"I'm early," he said. "I wanted to see what you were selling me."

He walked the whole length of the hall, and no one at the table breathed louder than they had to.

He stopped behind my chair and looked at the flower vase.

"Smart," he said to me, quietly. "That decanter is not for drinking."

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