He Chose the Girl Who Tried to Kill Him novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Girl With the Pistol
A maid aims a pistol at the groom at Adaline's wedding, and he calls her by name. That night Adaline sees her wearing his jacket, sets the ring down and walks out to find her father waiting.
The first time I saw Nan Fenner, she had a pistol aimed at my groom's heart.
It happened in front of two hundred guests, on the church steps, ten minutes before I was due to walk in.
I was standing in the vestibule in my mother's wedding dress with my father's arm through mine.
Langston was ahead of us, at the foot of the aisle, turning to smile at me.
A girl in a grey maid's dress stepped out from behind the last pew.
She was small, with dark red hair cut to her jaw, and she held the pistol in both hands.
Her hands did not shake at all.
Nobody screamed at first.
An organist went on playing for three whole bars before he understood.
Then a woman in the third row dropped her hymnal, and the clatter rang off every wall of the church.
"Get that girl out of here," my father said.
He said it loudly, and he said it before anyone had asked who she was.
I remember that because I looked up at him, and he was already looking at the door.
Langston had not moved.
He stood with his hands open at his sides and the light from the window across his face.
"Nan," he said.
It was a quiet voice, the one he used with horses.
"Nan, put it down."
I did not understand how my groom knew the name of a girl with a gun.
The girl did not lower it.
Her eyes were on his chest, and her mouth moved, but I was too far away to hear the words.
Langston took one step toward her.
"I know," he said. "I know. Not here."
Then he walked up the aisle and put his hand over the barrel and turned it gently toward the floor.
She let him.
That was the part I could not stop seeing afterward, that she let him take it.
"A misunderstanding," Langston called, turning to the pews with the pistol hidden against his coat. "A former servant. She is unwell. Please, everyone, go home. We will send word."
His mother was already on her feet in the front row, dove grey from hat to glove.
Mrs. Haldane took my hands in the vestibule and kissed my cheek.
"Langston has it in hand, my darling," she said. "It is a trifle. You'll be married by Christmas."
My father stood beside her, nodding, saying nothing.
No policeman came.
Nobody sent for one.
The carriages left one by one with the guests looking back at me from the windows, and Langston walked the girl out the side door with his arm around her shoulders.
I stood in my mother's dress on the church steps and watched him do it.
By nine that night I had changed out of the dress and taken a cab to the Haldane house on Euclid Avenue.
I had not been invited.
The footman let me in because I was still, for one more night, the future Mrs. Haldane.
The hall was lit and empty.
I heard a step on the great staircase and looked up.
Nan Fenner was coming down it in her stocking feet.
She was wearing Langston's grey frock coat.
It hung past her knees, and she had rolled the sleeves four times to find her hands.
Under her arm she carried a tin box, the kind a person keeps letters in, with a paper tag tied to the handle.
She stopped three stairs from the bottom when she saw me.
Langston came out of his study behind me, in his shirtsleeves, with no coat at all.
"Ada," he said, without surprise. "I was going to call on you in the morning."
"Who is she?"
"Someone who needed looking after."
"She pointed a gun at you."
"She did," he said, and he smiled, the gentle smile I had loved for eight months. "And she did not fire it. Does that not tell you something?"
The girl on the stairs said nothing.
She was looking at me, and what I saw in her face was not triumph.
It was warning.
I took the ring off my finger.
It was Haldane diamonds, three of them, set in my future mother-in-law's own gold.
I laid it on the hall table next to the silver card tray.
"I am not marrying a man who keeps a girl in his coat after she tried to kill him," I said. "Send my trunks to my father's house. I won't be there long."
So I stepped out of the Haldane house and into the rain.
There was a carriage at the kerb, and I knew the horses.
My father leaned out of the window with the lamp behind him.
"Get in," Ernest Severance said. "Then go back inside and apologize to him."
Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend