Married to My Ex's Uncle novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: Room Twelve
Minutes before her wedding, Greta gets a video of her groom in bed with her maid of honor, walks the aisle alone to tell the guests, and when Tanner says nobody will marry a killer's sister, his uncle stands up and says he would.
Outside the great hall, Greta Lindahl stood at the double doors with her phone shaking in her hand.
Inside, the string quartet was playing the song before her song.
In eight minutes she was supposed to walk down the aisle.
Her phone buzzed again.
It was Kristi, her maid of honor, who had gone upstairs twenty minutes ago to fix her lipstick.
"Guess whose groom is in my bed right now?"
Greta read it twice.
She thought it was a joke.
Kristi had been making jokes all day, with champagne in a coffee mug.
Then the video came through.
It was shot from low on a pillow.
Kristi's bare shoulder filled half the screen.
The other half was Tanner, flat on his back in the guest bed, his tuxedo shirt open to the waist.
On the nightstand behind him was the brass room number from the door.
Twelve.
Kristi giggled off camera. "Isn't she waiting for you?"
Tanner laughed and pulled her down by her hair.
"She'll walk down that aisle whatever I do," he said. "Where else would she go?"
The video ended.
Greta looked down at her own hands.
She had scrubbed them for an hour last night with dish soap and a nail brush.
There was still a dark line of engine grease in the crease of one thumb.
Tanner had kissed that thumb this morning and called it her something blue.
Through the doors she could hear two hundred people shifting in their chairs.
Her father should have been standing beside her.
He'd been dead six years.
Her brother should have been standing beside her.
Nils was in a prison in Oshkosh, nine years into twelve.
So she had planned to walk alone.
She wiped her eyes once with the heel of her hand.
Then she pushed the doors open.
The quartet stumbled and stopped.
Two hundred heads turned.
Somebody whispered, "She's early."
Greta walked down the aisle in her mother's altered dress with no music at all.
Her heels were loud on the old pine boards.
The judge at the front was Margit Hollenbeck's golf partner.
He smiled at her, puzzled, and looked past her for the groom.
Greta held out her hand for his microphone.
He gave it to her.
"Hi, everybody," she said.
Her voice came back at her off the log beams.
"Thank you for coming out in the rain."
A few people laughed politely.
"The groom's running a little late," Greta said. "He's upstairs in room twelve with my maid of honor."
Nobody laughed this time.
In the front row, Margit Hollenbeck went perfectly still in her navy silk.
Greta held her phone against the microphone and pressed play.
Tanner's voice filled the hall.
"She'll walk down that aisle whatever I do. Where else would she go?"
Somebody's chair creaked.
An old woman in the third row put her hand over her mouth.
The side door banged open.
Tanner came in at a half run, buttoning his shirt with one hand.
His tie hung loose around his neck.
Kristi came in behind him in her dusty-rose dress, barefoot, holding her shoes.
One of her curls was flat on the side.
"Babe," Tanner said, too loud. "Babe, it's a prank. She's had like six mimosas."
He reached for Greta's arm.
She stepped back.
"Your cufflink's missing," she said into the microphone.
He looked down.
His left cuff hung open.
Greta had machined those cufflinks herself, two little brass anchors, and given them to him in a box at breakfast.
"It's probably on her side of the bed," Greta said.
Somebody near the back made a sound.
Margit stood up.
She didn't hurry.
She smoothed her skirt and came to the front, and she put her cool hand over the microphone.
"Sit down, Greta," she said quietly. "You will go through with this, and we'll deal with it privately."
"No."
"Think, dear." Margit's smile never moved. "A Lindahl doesn't get two offers on this peninsula."
Greta looked at her for a long moment.
Then she pulled the sapphire off her finger.
It had been Tanner's grandmother's.
It stuck at the knuckle and she worked it loose.
She walked over to Kristi and pressed it into her palm.
"Something borrowed," Greta said.
Kristi's face went pink and blotchy.
"Greta, I didn't think you'd actually..."
"Read it out loud? I know."
Greta turned to go.
The center aisle was long, and every face along it was turned toward her.
She'd fixed half their boats.
She'd hauled their docks out every October.
She started walking.
"Go on, then," Tanner said behind her.
His voice had changed.
The charm was gone out of it.
"Walk out. Where are you going to go?"
She kept walking.
"Who do you think is going to marry you now?" he shouted. "Your brother killed a man on that water out there. Everybody in this room knows it."
Greta stopped.
"Nobody on this peninsula is going to marry a killer's sister."
The hall was so quiet she could hear the rain on the windows.
She could feel every person in it not looking at her.
Her throat closed up.
Nine years of the grocery store going quiet when she walked in.
Nine years of people being kind to her in the voice they used for funerals.
She made her chin come up.
She was going to make it to those doors if it killed her.
At the very back of the hall, a chair scraped across the pine.
Everyone turned.
A man was standing up in the last row.
He was tall, in a dark suit that didn't quite fit across the shoulders, and he had a curl of cedar shaving caught on his cuff.
Lukas Hollenbeck.
Tanner's uncle.
The one who used to be a priest.
The family had seated him behind the caterers' table, as far from Margit as the room allowed.
That morning on the dock, he had been the only Hollenbeck to ask Greta if she was happy.
He looked down the aisle at her, steady and quiet, and then he looked past her at his nephew.
"I would," he said.
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