Nine Rejected Marriages, I Wed My Ex's Rival novel · Chapter 3 of 24
Chapter 3: Sidewalk
Preston finds the certificate on the sidewalk and Claire calls Weston her husband in front of a line of couples.
Preston left the engine running and the door open.
He took the steps two at a time, with his tie pulled loose and his hair pushed back by a hand that had not stopped moving.
"Claire."
He stopped on the step below hers, breathing hard.
"You blocked me. You actually blocked me. I've been calling from the hospital for ten minutes, and it goes nowhere."
"It does that," Claire said.
"Babe, listen. It was an emergency."
He said it softly, with the worried frown he used when he wanted her to feel she was the one being difficult.
It had worked eight times.
"Delaney fell. They thought it was a fracture. I couldn't leave her on the floor of a rehearsal hall, Claire, what kind of person would that make me?"
"A person who was on time," she said.
Two women had stopped at the bottom of the steps with their coats half buttoned.
A courier on a bicycle slowed down.
Preston noticed none of them.
He looked at her and was already sure he could fix this.
"We'll go in right now," he said. "We'll go in and I'll talk to someone. They'll fit us in. I'll make a donation."
"We're not going in."
"Don't be dramatic. It's a form, we've had the form for months."
"Preston."
She lifted her left hand.
The plain gold ring was very bright against her cold knuckles.
He looked at it.
Then he looked at the paper in her other hand, the certificate with its clean stamp and two signatures.
He read the top line, and then he read it again, and she watched the color leave his face in stages.
"What is this?"
"A marriage certificate."
"Whose?"
"Mine."
"Claire, that's not funny. We don't, that's, who is..."
Behind her, a step sounded on the stone.
It was not loud, and she knew it before she turned.
Weston Crane had stopped a step above her when the car jumped the curb, with his coat over one arm.
He had thanked the clerk twice on the way out, which was something Preston had never once done in his life.
He came down to stand beside her, and he did not hurry.
His hand settled at the small of her back.
It was a light touch, flat through her coat, and she felt it all the way down.
Nobody had put a hand there for years.
Rule three, she remembered, a little late: no touching unless someone was watching.
The courier on the bicycle was filming with one hand.
"Preston," Weston said pleasantly. "You look tired."
Preston's mouth worked.
"Crane."
It was not a name, the way he said it.
It was a word he had been told never to say in front of his father.
"You," he said. "You can't. She's mine. We're getting married."
"We just did," said Claire.
She had meant to say it coldly.
It came out clear and steady instead, and the women on the pavement heard every word.
"This is my husband," she said.
It was strange to say.
It was stranger that it was easy.
Preston took a step up.
"You're lying," he said. "You wanted to get back at me. It's one bad day, Claire, you're upset, we can fix it. Tell him it was a joke."
"No."
"Delaney's in a hospital bed because of the way you're acting."
"Delaney's ankle is why you were late for the ninth time," Claire said. "I won't wait in a chair while you go and fix her."
She had not known she would say that.
It sat in the air, plain and awful.
Preston reached out.
He did not reach for her face.
He reached for the certificate, fast, to tear it.
Weston's hand closed around his wrist before it had gone halfway.
It did not look like effort.
"Don't," he said.
The word was very quiet.
Preston stared at the hand, and then at the man.
Something moved in his face that was not anger and not fear, and it took Claire a moment to name it.
It was old.
It looked like grief.
"You always do this," Preston said hoarsely. "You always get there first. You take everything I want."
"I took a phone call," Weston said.
"You're the one thing I would never let you have."
He was not talking to Claire.
He was staring at Weston, and she had the odd feeling she was a bystander to something that had begun long before she walked into the building.
Weston let go.
Preston stumbled back one step and caught the railing.
For a second he looked very young, and shut out.
Then his chin came up, and he looked at Claire.
"He takes everything from me," he said. "Ask him why."
Claire felt the question land, cold, in the middle of her chest.
She turned her head.
Weston's face had gone blank and shut.
"Dinner at my mother's," he said to her, without a glance at Preston. "Tonight. She's already cooking. I told her an hour ago."
"An hour ago I wasn't married."
"That's why I told her an hour ago."
He took her elbow and turned her toward the curb.
Ross was already holding the rear door of the black car, looking at a point in the middle of the street.
Claire did not look back.
She heard her phone buzz in her coat, once, and again.
She knew without looking that it was Delaney, and for the first time in four years she let it ring.
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