She Took My Wedding, So I Married the Don novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Toast
At the dinner before her wedding, Claire's sister announces she is carrying the groom's baby and their mother asks for the dress. Claire leaves the ring in a glass and finds a car door already open.
The night before my wedding, my sister stood up at our mother's dining table and said she was eleven weeks pregnant.
Tara didn't look at the room when she said it.
She looked at Shane.
Shane was my fiancé.
He looked at his plate.
Eleven relatives sat around the table, and nobody picked up a fork.
My mother put both hands over her mouth and burst into tears.
"A baby," she said. "Oh, Tara. A baby in this house again."
In the hall, Grandpa's tall clock went on ticking.
I looked at Shane too.
He had proposed to me in a diner booth two years ago, with a ring he paid off in installments.
Last Sunday he had told me not to be hard on Tara, because she was lonely since her breakup and he was only helping her move.
He had been helping her move for three months.
"Shane," I said. "Is it yours?"
He didn't say no.
"Claire, please," he said. "Not tonight. We were going to tell you after the wedding."
My aunt looked into her wine.
My mother wiped her eyes with the tissue she keeps in her cardigan sleeve, and then she turned to me with her whole face gone soft.
"Claire, honey," she said. "I need you to be the big sister now."
"What do you need?"
"The dress."
I thought I had heard her wrong.
"Tara can't walk into St. Brendan's in a maternity smock," she said. "The church is paid for. The Garland Room is paid for. The band and the flowers are all booked under your name, so nobody even has to call anyone."
"Mom."
"Tara only has to step into your four o'clock."
"That's my wedding."
"It's a wedding," my mother said. "And there's a baby coming."
Tara's eyes filled up. "I'm sorry, Claire. I never planned it."
Under the tablecloth, Shane's hand found hers.
I saw the cloth move.
Everyone at the table waited for me to be the strong one, as I always had been.
I took off my ring.
I dropped it into Shane's champagne glass, and it clicked against the bottom.
"The dress is upstairs on my old bed," I said. "It's a size six, and the hem is taken up for me. Tara will need heels."
"Claire, wait," Shane said.
I walked out through the hall, past Grandpa's clock, and took my coat off the hook.
Nobody followed me.
Outside, the street was cold and quiet.
A black sedan sat across from the house, in the same spot it had sat every Sunday for a month.
Every Sunday after dinner, my mother had handed me a foil plate and sent me over to it.
Never Tara. Always me.
"Be kind to him," she would say. "He's only somebody's driver."
The driver always said thank you and never anything else.
Tonight he was already out of the car and holding the rear door open.
I hadn't even stepped off the curb.
A man sat in the back seat, lit by the dome lamp, one hand resting on his knee.
He wore a black suit and had a pale scar through his left eyebrow.
"Claire Rafferty," he said.
"Who are you?"
"Silvio Carrara." He nodded toward my mother's house. "Your mother owes my family four hundred thousand dollars. It's due on Sunday."
I laughed, and it came out wrong.
"My mother doesn't owe anyone anything."
"She borrowed it four years ago, after your father's medical bills. The house is the collateral." He said it evenly. "I came tonight to collect, but through that window she looks busy."
Through the window, Tara stood in the light with my mother's arms around her.
"Why are you telling me this?"
"Because I need a wife by noon on Sunday." He didn't smile. "My father's chair goes to my uncle unless the man who sits in it is married. I don't have time to be anything but honest."
"That's a strange thing to say to a woman on a curb."
"You're getting married at St. Brendan's tomorrow at four. My family paid for that church's roof, so the priest tells me what's booked." He glanced at the lit window. "Somebody in that house is about to use your slot. I'd rather it was you."
I looked at the window again.
Tara was laughing now, wiping her cheek.
My mother had said the booking was under my name.
It was.
"If I say yes," I said, "what happens to my mother's debt?"
"I tear it up."
"And Tara? Shane?"
"Nothing happens to them that you don't decide."
I didn't think about it any longer than that.
So I got into the car.
The driver shut the door behind me, and the street went quiet.
Only when we pulled away did I notice something I hadn't weighed on the curb.
The driver had opened that door before I ever left the house.
"Saturday at four," I said. "St. Brendan's."
Silvio Carrara turned his head, and the dome light caught his whole face.
"That's the first time you've looked at me," he said. "You carried me four plates of pot roast and never once did."
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