Double Contract Love novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Wrong Sister
At her own engagement party, Lillian watches her fiance announce he is marrying her stepsister while her stepmother puts her late mother's ring on Tabitha's hand; she drops his ring in his bourbon, promises to arrive at their wedding with a husband, and sits down beside a stranger at the bar.
The night my stepmother gave away my mother's ring, she did it with a champagne glass in her hand.
I was standing at the back of the Merriweather Room with a ring of my own on my finger.
It was Preston's ring.
I had worn it for three years.
The party was supposed to be for me.
Gwen had called it a family toast, and she had called it three days ago.
I thought she wanted to talk about the wedding.
My wedding was set for Saturday, November 22, at St. Aldric's, with the reception in this very room.
I had paid the deposit myself.
Four hundred people were crowded under the chandeliers, and every one of them knew my name.
Lillian Thornbury, the late Walter Thornbury's daughter, the girl who would finally get a husband.
Gwen tapped her glass with a fork.
"Thank you all for coming," she said, and her smile was the one she used on bankers.
"This family has had a hard two years."
Everyone nodded.
My father had died two years ago in June, and Gwen had worn black until Easter.
"Tonight we start something new," she said.
Then Preston walked up to the little stage beside her.
He didn't look at me.
He took Tabitha's hand instead, and my stepsister stepped up in a green dress I had never seen.
My stomach went cold in a way I felt in my teeth.
"I've been honest with myself, and I need to be honest with you," Preston said.
He had practiced it.
I could tell, because he used the voice from his work presentations.
"I fell in love with the wrong sister, and then I fell in love with the right one."
Somebody laughed, a short nervous sound, and somebody else gasped.
Tabitha held up her left hand.
On it was a thin gold band with a small blue sapphire.
I knew the sapphire.
My mother had worn it every day until the week she died, when I was twelve.
My father had locked it in the study safe and told me it would be mine on my wedding day.
"Lillian, honey, we wanted you to hear it first," Gwen said.
She said it into the microphone.
"The date and the church are already booked, so nothing goes to waste."
She meant my date.
She meant my church.
The room went so quiet I heard the oak tree scraping the courtyard window.
Four hundred faces turned toward me, and every one of them was waiting to see me cry.
I could feel the old reflex rising, the one that said smile, say congratulations, go home.
I had been doing it for two years.
I looked at Preston's ring and I slid it off.
It came off easier than I expected.
I walked down the center aisle with my heels clicking, past the cake and past the string quartet, who had stopped playing.
I stopped at the stage and held the ring over Preston's bourbon.
Then I let go.
It sank to the bottom of the glass with a small clean plink.
"Keep it," I told him.
"It was always a little tight."
Someone in the back snorted.
Tabitha's face went red and then white.
I took the microphone from Gwen's hand before she could close her fingers on it.
"Congratulations, both of you," I said, and my voice came out steady and a little too loud.
"I'll be at that wedding on November 22."
"I'll be sitting in the front row, and I'll bring my husband."
The silence got worse.
Gwen laughed softly, the way you laugh at a child who has said something sweet and impossible.
"You don't have a husband, sweetheart."
"I will by tomorrow noon," I said.
I put the microphone down on the piano and I walked out.
Nobody stopped me, because nobody wanted to be the person who touched the crazy girl.
In the corridor my hands started shaking so hard I had to press them flat against the wall.
My phone buzzed in my clutch.
It was Gwen, and she had texted me from forty feet away.
"Your things will be on the porch in the morning. Don't make a scene on Cherokee Road."
I read it twice.
The house on Cherokee Road was the house I grew up in.
My father had painted the porch ceiling blue so the wasps wouldn't nest there.
I took the service stairs down to the lobby because I could not stand the elevator mirror.
The hotel bar was nearly empty, a long dark room that smelled of lemon oil and old bourbon.
At the far end sat a big man in a canvas work jacket, drinking coffee, with sawdust still in the seams of his boots.
He was the only person in the building who hadn't been at the party.
I walked straight up to him and sat on the next stool.
"Are you married?" I said.
He turned his head slowly.
He had a stubbled jaw, short sandy hair, and very blue eyes.
"No," he said.
"Good," I said.
"I need one by noon tomorrow. Are you busy?"
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