After He Gave My Wedding Away, I Built My Empire novel · Chapter 11 of 24

Chapter 11: The Fourth Bride

I held the phone out to him at six in the morning, with the screen toward his face.

Caleb read it.

He didn't try to take it.

"Since 2021," I said. "Tell me what that means."

"It means I'll take you to her." He sat up and rubbed his face. "I should have taken you on Monday. Get dressed."

By eight, we were in a small stationery studio in Beaufort, with a letterpress in the window and the smell of ink.

The woman who let us in was tall, about my age, with sandy hair cut short and black ink under every fingernail.

She looked at me, and then at Caleb, and her mouth went flat.

"Linnea," Caleb said. "This is Cassandra."

"I know who she is. Everyone does." She stepped back to let me in and did not step back for him. "You can come in, Caleb. You can stand by the door."

He stood by the door.

Linnea led me to a worktable covered in proofs and set a thin folder in front of me.

"Open it," she said.

Inside was a photocopy of a two-page paper with a trust deed header and a signature line.

I knew every word of it.

I had signed one just like it at Colin's kitchen island.

"Linnea Dahl," I read. "Thackeray-Dahl Family Trust. Forty-nine percent."

"Colin proposed in a hot air balloon over Tybee in March of 2021," she said. "I owned a stationery company with eleven employees. We were going to be a power couple."

"He said the trust was a wedding formality."

"He said it was for the family." She smiled without any warmth. "Two weeks later, I was in the back of a bridal car, listening to a livestream."

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