I Married a Stranger with No Past

Harper's POV

The party wasn't due to start for another hour, and I had already been standing in the side corridor with Bud Carver for twenty minutes.

The strap of my dress was biting into my shoulder and one heel had wedged itself into the seam at the edge of the carpet, and I had the commercial lease spread out on the windowsill, open to Article Fourteen, reading it to him word for word.

But Bud wasn't looking at the contract. He was watching the two servers setting out wine glasses at the far end of the hall, with the look of a man watching his pension check land.

"Harper, you know what that parcel is worth now," he said.

"I know." I pushed the contract half an inch toward him. "Which is why you won't come right out and say you want to cash out, and you're using the rezoning as a shield instead."

He finally moved his eyes back to me and let them sit on my face for half a second. "There's a force majeure clause in the contract."

"A zoning change is a human decision, not an act of God." I hadn't raised my voice, but I bit down on every syllable — two years standing at a lectern in a high school classroom had left me with the habit; the angrier I got, the cleaner my diction. "If you want me out, you go through the proper process. I'm entitled to a hearing, and you haven't sat down with me once."

"And chances are you can't cover the next rent check as it stands." Then he reached out, pulled the contract out of my hands, folded it shut, and tucked it under his arm. "Your business loan on that coffee shop must be coming due. Enjoy your party while there's still time," he said. "This conversation is over."

I stood where I was and watched him walk into the hall. The contract bobbed under his arm with every step. Twenty minutes, and he hadn't meant to concede a single word. He hadn't come here to negotiate. He had come to give notice.

Josie poked her head out of the hall with a glass in her hand, caught me by the wrist, and pulled me inside. "Come on, it's almost time. Where's your man?"

"I'll go find him in a minute." I took the glass she handed me and drank; there was too much soda water in the wine. "Bud wants me out of the coffee shop. The development people are paying him, and he wants the space cleared before next quarter."

"Now? An hour before your engagement party starts?"

"He said our conversation was over."

Josie watched me for three seconds, her eyes narrowing a little at a time. "Then it isn't over. After the party's done, I'll go with you and have a proper talk with that old man."

"Right," I said, setting the glass down on a tray. "It isn't over. I've still got a chance to fight for it."

I had to find Liam. After the party broke up tonight I was going to see a lawyer, and he did development work at Vance — surely he knew a few people who understood zoning. I needed his connections for this.

Walking through the crowd toward the back, I saw Mrs. Miller raise a hand to me and I smiled back; on the table against the wall sat the cake my mother had made with her own hands, my name and Liam's piped in white icing. I was lining up what I would say as I walked — the shop first, then the lawyer, and only then that the wedding date would have to be pushed back. I had the order all worked out.

The door of the dressing room at the end of the inner hall hadn't been pulled all the way shut. A narrow strip of light came through.

I pushed it open.

Afterward I couldn't say with any accuracy what I saw first. Whether it was his suit jacket over the back of the chair, or half of her shoe lying on its side on the carpet. It didn't matter. What mattered was that I stood in the doorway, both of them saw me, and neither of them said the three words first.

Blair was the one who spoke.

"Harper—" She didn't even reach for a coat to cover herself. She had one bare white arm hooked around Liam's neck, her body pressed tight against his chest, and I could still see her legs swinging free, and her voice was soft, soft the way a thing gets when it's been soaked through. "You've got the wrong idea. We were only—"

"Shut up."

I hadn't expected my own voice to come out that low, that flat. But Blair stopped.

I looked at Liam. Unhurried, he picked his clothes up off the floor and slowly covered his tan skin, covered all of the flesh, and only then turned to me and said, "You shouldn't have barged in here like this."

He said I shouldn't have barged in. What a laughable thing to say.

Something under my ribs was drawing inward, tightening one turn at a time, and I had to pull a breath before I could push the words out. "You're in here having sex with a friend I grew up with. At our engagement party. And you have the nerve to blame me for exposing your affair?"

"Don't blow everything out of proportion." He finally looked at me, his tone as level as if he were reading off a report. "It was only this once."

Only this once? How many times would he have wanted? I had meant to leave. Turn around, walk out, not let them see my face. That was the plan.

But Blair spoke up behind me. "Harper, don't be like this. I know Liam still has feelings for you in his heart. Today I just liked him too much — I couldn't control what I felt, so I begged him to give me this one time. I promise it won't happen again. Don't be like this, all right? We can still be friends."

I had never imagined that a friend who sang in the same choir as me, went to the same school as me, and turned up at my house with a cake every single Thanksgiving could say something that disgusting.

I turned back around and looked at her for two careful seconds.

"You've been like this since you were a child," I said, and there wasn't the slightest tremor of tears in it. "Whatever you want, you just reach out and take it. And when you're finished, you want a thank you."

"I didn't. I just like him too much—"

"Don't use that disgusting tone with me," I said. "As of today, we don't know each other."

Liam cut in then, his voice hardening. "There are still guests out there. Calm yourself down."

"I'm perfectly calm." I looked at him. "I'm going out there to tell everyone that tonight's party is cancelled."

I walked out of the dressing room, through the inner hall, into the main hall.

The music was still playing. Someone raised a glass at me, someone called my name with a laugh, Mrs. Miller nodded to me from her corner. I knew every face — the neighbors from down the road, the church regulars, my mother's card-table partners, the old customers who came into the shop every day for the same cup of coffee.

I walked to the front of the hall and picked up the microphone from the table beside the speakers.

There was a small click, and the room quieted by degrees. Sixty faces turned toward me. My palm had gone damp around the handle.

Say it, and it's over. Say it, and tonight ends right here. I knew exactly what I was doing.

"Thank you all for coming tonight. I'm sorry to say there's been a bit of an incident—"

My mother, Dolores Hayes, was already coming through the crowd, faster than a woman her age has any business moving. She caught my wrist, smiling, and steered me half a step aside, that smile of hers held up very steady, her voice pressed down so low that only I could hear it.

"What do you think you're doing."

"I'm cancelling this engagement."

"Harper."

"Mom." I lowered my voice too. "You have no idea what happened—"

"But I can't let you make a decision in the heat of the moment and live to regret it!" She cut me off, her knuckles tightening around my wrist. "If you say it into that microphone right now, what am I supposed to do? The whole church is here. The Women's Auxiliary is here. Mrs. Miller. The Davenports. Every one of them is sitting out there—"

"I don't care about Mrs. Miller."

"Think about it carefully." Her voice dropped lower, and every word pressed down. "That shop of yours still has a loan on it. If you wreck this engagement too, what exactly are you going to hold on to?"