My Fiancé Butt-Dialed Me Mid-Affair, So I Married His Brother novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Microphone
Joanna hears her fiancé and her best friend on a butt-dialed call, then plays it to the whole engagement party. His older brother steps forward and tells her to marry him instead.
The night before my engagement party, my fiancé's phone called mine while he was in bed with my best friend.
I was alone at the end of a hotel bar, nursing a club soda.
My best friend had texted me at six: "Wait at the hotel bar, keep your phone face up in front of you, and pick up anything that rings."
I had thought she was being sweet.
At nine the screen lit up with my fiancé's name.
I answered, and I heard a mattress.
Then Kendall's voice, breathless and clear.
Kendall Prentiss, my best friend since college.
"Brandon, we can't. The party is tomorrow. If Joanna ever finds out, I'll lose her."
Brandon laughed.
"Joanna? She wouldn't notice if I moved out. She never asks me anything."
I pressed the phone to my ear and tried not to smile.
For two months I had been looking for a way out of this engagement.
My lawyer had said the same thing every time.
If I ended it, my father owed the Lathrop family six million dollars in thirty days.
If a Lathrop ended it, the note was torn up.
I had found nothing.
And now this.
"Promise you'll leave her alone after the wedding," Kendall whispered.
"I'll sleep in the guest room," Brandon said. "Happy?"
"Say her name," Kendall said. "Say you know what you're doing to Joanna Sayre."
"Joanna Sayre is a bank loan with brown hair," Brandon said. "Come here."
I almost cried.
They were happy tears.
My phone had been recording since the first ring.
I had set it to record every call from Brandon back in August, and nobody knew but me.
I saved the file three times.
I sent it to my own email, to my cloud drive, and to a folder I named "Taxes."
Then I paid for my club soda and went home to sleep for the first time in two months.
Twelve hours later I stood in the ballroom of the Greenwich Country Club in a navy gown, with two hundred guests holding champagne.
Brandon stood beside me in a tux, smiling for the photographers.
His hand sat flat on my back.
Kendall was across the room in a green dress, with red eyes and a smile that wobbled.
She kept looking at me.
I kept looking at her until she looked away.
Constance Lathrop, Brandon's mother, tapped a glass.
She was fifty-eight, silver-haired and pearled, and she had never once raised her voice at me.
"Before the toasts," she said, "a few words from my son's bride-to-be."
She held the microphone out to me.
She meant it as a courtesy.
She wanted me to say thank you.
My father stood by the bar in his rumpled blue suit, looking at the floor.
He had signed the note in his kitchen the winter after my mother died.
He had never read the clause.
So I took the microphone.
"Thank you, Constance," I said. "I'd like to play something first."
Brandon's hand tightened on my back.
"Jo, what are you doing?"
The ballroom's sound system was already wired for the slideshow.
The technician at the side table looked at me, and I lifted my phone.
I had given him a thumb drive at five that afternoon.
"This is my engagement present," I said. "To everyone here."
I nodded to the technician.
The speakers crackled.
Then two hundred people heard a mattress.
Then they heard Kendall.
"Brandon, we can't. The party is tomorrow."
Every head in the room turned to a green dress.
Kendall did not run.
She set down her glass and stood very still, with tears already on her face.
Brandon's laugh came out of the ceiling.
"Joanna Sayre is a bank loan with brown hair."
Somebody gasped.
A woman near the front said, "Oh my God," and covered her mouth.
Brandon's face went white.
"Turn that off," he said. "Turn it off!"
Nobody touched it.
"Come here," his recorded voice said, and then the file ended.
In the silence I slid his ring off my finger.
I set it on the cake table, next to the knife.
"So I'm done," I said into the microphone.
I handed it back to Constance.
She took it.
She did not look angry.
She looked at me with a soft, sorry smile, and she spoke without raising her voice.
"Joanna, dear. The agreement your father signed says a Lathrop must end this engagement."
She tilted her head.
"A bride who humiliates the groom in public is ending it herself."
My stomach dropped.
"Your father has thirty days," she said. "Six million dollars. Do you have it?"
Across the ballroom my father's face went gray.
Brandon recovered fast.
He stepped in front of me and took my hand, and spoke low enough that only I heard.
"Put the ring back on, Jo. We'll say it was a prank. Mom will fix it."
I pulled my hand away.
A chair scraped at the back of the room.
A tall man in a dark suit that did not fit him well came down the center aisle.
I knew his face from one old family photograph.
Hayes Lathrop, Brandon's older half-brother, whom nobody had invited and nobody had mentioned in eight years.
Constance's smile finally slipped.
"Hayes," she said. "You're not welcome here."
He ignored her and stopped in front of me.
"I read the agreement before I came," he said. "It doesn't say Brandon. It says a Lathrop son."
He held out his hand.
"I'm a Lathrop son too, Miss Sayre. Marry me instead."
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