He Kissed My Sister on the Day I Was Forced to Wed novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Group Chat
Sutton's Hartwell letter and the kiss video land in the same two minutes, and she walks into Draper Wharf with her own terms for the forced wedding.
The email from Hartwell University came in at 8:12 on the morning of my wedding.
I was sitting on the back steps with a cold cup of coffee when my phone buzzed.
"Congratulations, Sutton Landry. On behalf of the Admissions Committee, we are delighted to offer you a place in the Class of 2030."
I read the first line four times.
Then I put my hand over my mouth and laughed out loud, alone, with the neighbor's dog barking back at me.
I had retaken the SAT in the spring.
I had written the essay at two in the morning on my mother's old desk.
Nobody in my house knew I had applied.
For about two minutes I was the happiest person in Port Alder, Ohio.
Then I opened the class group chat to tell somebody, and I froze.
The newest post was a video, sent at 8:09.
It was barely twenty seconds long.
My little sister, Camryn, was standing against a kitchen counter in a party dress.
My boyfriend, Reed Hargreave, had one hand in her hair.
They were kissing.
There were forty-one reactions under it already.
A text from Reed came in while I was still staring.
"Don't be mad. It was just Truth or Dare at the graduation party. I lost a round, so we kissed. It meant nothing."
I read it, and I felt nothing, which scared me more than crying would have.
I had seen this exact movie before.
A year ago, I had walked into our garage and found my first boyfriend, Tripp Danvers, with his mouth on Camryn's.
That was the afternoon before my SAT.
I sat in a gym the next morning staring at a page of numbers, and all I could see was her hand on his collar.
I scored 1190.
Everyone said I had a bad day.
Reed was the one who stayed.
He tore up his own acceptance letter in my driveway that summer and said, "I'll take a gap year. I'll be here."
He drove me to every retake class.
He held my hair back the night I cried until I was sick.
I had thought he was the one good thing that had happened to me.
I scrolled up and watched the video again.
Camryn had her eyes open.
She was looking straight at the camera.
My bedroom door opened without a knock.
"You're up," my stepmother said.
She was in her good robe with her good pearls, and she looked at my phone and then at my face.
"The car comes at three. The ivory dress is on the hanger, and your father wants a word before you go."
I had known about the wedding since Tuesday.
My father had sat me down at the kitchen table, crying into his hands, and told me he had taken $2.8 million out of Draper Wharf over six years.
The old man who owned it could have him in prison by lunch.
Or a Landry daughter could marry the old man's grandson.
By four o'clock on Saturday.
"Which daughter?" I had asked, and nobody answered, and then I understood that it had never been a question.
"Camryn has her whole life ahead of her," my stepmother had said that night.
She never said what mine had.
Now I looked at the woman in the doorway.
"Did she send it to you first?" I asked.
"Send what, darling?"
"The video."
She smiled.
It was a very small smile, and it was gone in a second, and I saw it.
I stood up with my phone in one hand.
"I'll be ready," I said.
"Good girl."
I waited until I heard her heels go down the stairs.
Then I printed my Hartwell letter on the old inkjet, took the keys to my mother's old Honda off the hook, and walked out the back door in my pajama pants.
Nobody stopped me.
They were all in the kitchen arranging flowers.
Draper Wharf sat at the end of Pier Street with its cranes lit gold in the morning, and the big grey house behind it had a gate with a camera.
I leaned on the buzzer until the gate opened.
On the steps of the house stood four men.
I recognized them from the newspaper.
The Pier Four, the paper called them, the boys who grew up on the docks and now ran the lake.
All four were in black suits for a rehearsal, and none of them had buttoned a shirt.
Ink ran across their chests and down their arms.
The tallest of them, in the middle, was holding a coffee, and he was looking at me.
Roan Draper.
I had never met him.
In an hour I was supposed to be his wife.
"You're early," he said.
"I'm not here for the rehearsal."
I walked up the steps and held out the paper.
I had written on the back of it in the car, standing at a red light, in block letters.
"One. I keep my name. Two. I go to Hartwell in August. Three. Nobody touches my letter. Sign it, and I'll walk in at four on my own feet."
Behind me an old voice said, "She has nerve, that one."
The old man was in the doorway in a wheelchair, with a blanket across his knees and eyes like wet stone.
"Her father is a thief," he said.
"I know," I said. "I'm the only Landry in that house who didn't steal from you."
Roan read the paper twice.
His mouth moved at one corner.
He took a pen from one of his brothers and wrote under my words, and then he turned it around.
I read his handwriting.
"Four. You sleep in my bed."
My face went hot.
"When I say," I said.
He wrote that, too, and he held it out.
"When you say."
My phone buzzed in my hand.
It was Camryn.
"Reed is coming to the wedding as my plus-one. See you at four, sis."
I didn't know I had said it aloud until the man with the scarred eyebrow whistled.
Roan took the phone out of my fingers and read the screen.
"Who is Reed?" he asked.
"My boyfriend," I said. "The one who kissed my sister."
He handed the phone back, slowly.
"Then he sits in the front row," Roan said, "and he watches."
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