Ashes of My Engagement

On the day I got engaged, my fiancé's first love walked off a cliff and posted her goodbye note. It was addressed to him. "You want to marry her? Then let this be your punishment.

You lose me. Forever." The whole country lost its mind. By dinner, everyone had decided the two of them had been together in secret for years.

The tabloid crews shoved through the doors of our engagement party and put a mic in Julian's face. He held my hand.

He smiled, easy and warm. "I have no relationship with that woman." "I love my wife.

I always will." For about ten seconds, with the ring cool and new on my finger, I believed the ten years had finally paid off.

Three days later, the most straitlaced man in the physics department slit his wrists over her. Here's what I found out later. The woman who went off that cliff for him didn't die.

And the things he'd kept for half his life, guarded for half his life. The green feather. The butterscotch candies. The love letter with no name on it.

Every one of them came from me. The whole world cried over their love story and made me the villainess of it. Not one person ever asked why I was the one who deserved to die.

Chapter 1 On the day Julian Sheridan and I got engaged, Odette Beaumont walked off a cliff. She was the principal dancer at the best company in the country.

She left him a note. "You want to marry her? Then let this be your punishment. You lose me. Forever." Somebody posted it anonymously. By midnight it had eaten the internet alive.

The internet went digging and didn't sleep.

In Odette Beaumont's short, bright life they kept finding the same shape: a man who'd loved her down to the bone, and lost her because the gap between their worlds was too wide.

That man was probably my fiancé. Julian Sheridan. He heard the news with my ring pinched between his fingers.

The tabloid crews came in a wave, straight through the doors of the party.

The questions came sharp and they came fast. "Professor Sheridan, have you seen Miss Beaumont's note?" "Do you know her? What's your relationship?" Flashes went off in bursts.

Every lens tracked him. They all wanted the same thing. One crack in the face of the physics department's golden boy.

Julian didn't give them one. "I've seen it," he said. "I have no relationship with that woman." The reporters pushed. "People are saying you two were together.

That it's a forbidden oldmoney romance novel come to life. Any comment?" My hand closed around nothing. This was my tenth year standing next to Julian Sheridan.

Three thousand nights. I had finally gotten him to say it out loud. There was no way this was real. It was so ridiculous I laughed.

I stepped in front of the cameras. "We don't know any Odette Beaumont." "I've been with my fiancé for ten years. We got engaged today.

Please stop making things up." Then I tipped my head back and waited for him to say it with me. Julian's eyes stayed down. Dark.

Steady. "That's right," he said. "I'm getting married." He pinched my ring finger and slid the ring on, slow. Then, in front of every camera in the room, he kissed my forehead.

All that cold in his face went soft. "Wren. After tonight, you get what you wanted." I thought ten years of loving him quietly had finally broken open into daylight.

Three days later, the most straitlaced man in the physics department slit his wrists over her. I found him on the floor of his study. Blood. A lot of it. His eyes were closed.

His face was calm. He looked like a man who had fallen asleep. The cut on his wrist went deep enough to show bone. Blood ran down his arm in a thin line and soaked the carpet red.

I clamped my hands over it and called an ambulance and I couldn't stop crying. The doctor said there was still a breath left in him. Barely. They ran him back.

They pulled an old necklace out of his bloody shirt. The young nurse's eyes went red when she handed it over.

She said it quietly, almost to herself. "He's worn it against his skin all these years.

There's really someone he can't let go of." Then she remembered who she was standing in front of. His fiancée.

By the time she put it in my hand, there was nothing in my head at all. Because the necklace wasn't mine. It got worse.

That night someone posted the photo of Julian being rushed in. Necklace and all. Somebody online noticed the pattern on it.

It matched the ring Odette Beaumont wore on her left hand. The guesses from three days ago came right back up. The internet lost its mind all over again.

Nobody thought about me that night. I was covered in his blood, and they packed me in at the hospital doors, shoulder to shoulder, until I couldn't move.

The questions came anyway. "Why did Professor Sheridan do it? Was it over Odette?" "The necklace. Was that theirs?" Chapter 2 I was shaking everywhere.

I held myself together long enough to answer. "Tonight was an accident." "I'm his fiancée. Please. Don't drag anyone else's name into this." It trended anyway.

TheySaidLoveSuicideWasAMyth sat at the top of the list and would not move. The internet kept picking, and things started floating up.

At every performance she ever gave, there was a shadow of Julian in the seats. In public they never crossed a line.

But her earrings matched his watch, and his things kept turning up in her photos. Sometimes at dawn. Sometimes late at night. That settled it.

The two of them had been burning quietly for years, and nobody had known. Overnight, the fanfic started pouring in.

Writers with soft, careful hands painted them into a beautiful old love story. And I was the villainess. The woman who came between them. The internet took me apart for it.

Commenters: [Julian Sheridan loved Odette Beaumont his whole life. Why is he marrying Wren Hale?] [Merger marriage.

Even a golden boy like Professor Sheridan can't get out of one.] [A principal dancer isn't good enough for the Sheridans? That's insane.] [Wren. Are you watching?

She paid for this with her life.] It came down on me in sheets. I sat by his bed alone and waited and jumped at every sound.

The few times I tried to defend myself, it went under so fast it was like I'd never spoken. All I wanted was for him to wake up. I had too many questions for him.

That was the truth. He didn't wake up with an explanation. Something else broke first. Odette Beaumont was single. Odette Beaumont had a fiveyearold daughter. A daughter.

The anchor kept talking. A shiver went down my spine and kept going. I looked up. Then they put the photo on screen. The little girl's eyes were almost exactly Julian's.

For a few seconds every sound in the room turned into a ring in my ears. I listened to the machine ticking beside him, and I put my head down, and that was that.

Julian came out of it after a week. He was calm about it. He called the whole thing an accident. I'd been chewed down to nothing by then. "Julian.

I need an explanation I can actually believe." He looked at me, calm, and gave me nothing. "I'm sorry I scared you," he said. Everything else, he wouldn't answer. The rumors?

By the day after he woke up, every last one of them was gone. Scrubbed. His reason: "My wife will have the dignity she's owed." That was the answer I'd waited days for.

Then it all landed on me at once. I gripped the hem of my shirt. The ultrasound I'd brought to show him had gone soft and creased at the bottom of my pocket. I was pregnant.

I hadn't gotten around to telling him. And right then it stopped mattering whether I ever did. Could she be his? And if she was, where did that leave ours?

Chapter 3 Julian went back to being perfect. He put me first in everything. He gave me every courtesy a woman could ask for.

My friends would not let it go. "Saw your picture on Professor Sheridan's desk again today. Whole department knows.

You two are the golden couple." I knew better. "He's too polite with me. Like I'm a stranger. Except that one night he got drunk—" "That's called respect. Don't be greedy.

You'll get it once you're married." Cold feet, they all decided. They took turns calling to talk me down. That day, right before we hung up, one of them remembered something.

Her voice went careful. "Wrennie, are you sick? I heard your Professor Sheridan took tonight off. Something about a hospital." I blanked. "No.

I'm fine." Julian had texted me a few minutes before that.

Him: [Working late tonight.] There was no way he'd taken a night off. "He left in a hurry," she said. "I assumed it was you." Ten years.

Julian had buried himself in that lab through everything, and nothing ever moved him off it. In ten years he had never taken a single night off for a single person.

Something in my chest turned over. I already had the address. I dug it out of my bag and got in a cab. I'd had someone find it for me. It was where Odette Beaumont's daughter was.

Kidney disease. That young. She was alive because of dialysis. So Julian knew about the child now. I thought about a day not long after he woke up. Mrs.

Sheridan had come rushing in and said something to him. I never heard what. A small smile had caught at the corner of his mouth.

For days his face had been shut and cold and nothing else. That was the first time anything alive moved across it. That was also the day he stopped sinking.

After his mother left, he took my hand. "Wren. Let's have a good life together." "I won't let anything happen again. I promise." The ward at night was deep and quiet.

I moved fast, past one closed door after another, and by the end my shirt was cold against my back. Two nurses passed me. Their voices drifted over. "God, that was close.

Margot almost didn't come back." "Poor woman. Thank God her husband got here." My head filled with a low, flat roar. Mo's mother. Odette was alive?

Something in me understood before the rest of me did, and I started walking toward Margot's room. I came around a corner and two bodies came into view, tangled together.

It went into me like a knife. I couldn't get air. Julian had a small woman pinned to the wall. One hand around her throat. He was kissing her like he'd been starving for years.

I had never once seen Julian lose control of anything. He wouldn't let her turn her head. Every time she tried, he chased her mouth down and took it apart.

There was nothing gentle anywhere in it. The only sound in that hallway was her fighting to get air. She had nowhere left to go.

She ended up folded into his chest, crying. "Julian, I can't fight your family." "As long as Mo gets to live, I'll give you up." Color came up under all that pale skin.

In the low light I finally saw her face. Odette. She really hadn't died. Chapter 4 Julian's face was full of something I'd waited ten years to see. He caught hers in both hands.

His voice came out low and torn. "Why did you lie to me?" "Etta. Did you want to watch me die?" Her lips shook.

She looked like a deer that had heard a branch snap. "It was— your mother made me." Julian combed her hair back off her face. Patient about it.

Gentling her. "Nothing is going to happen to you now." "I'm not letting either of you anywhere near that again." Something caught up with her. Panic went across her eyes. "Julian.

What are you doing?" His voice was desperate and it was tender. "I agreed to marry that stranger." "I'll do exactly what my family wants.

I'll be somebody else's husband, and I'll watch you from far away, and you will never want for anything as long as you live." That night the pain in my stomach put me in the ER.

Somewhere in the fog, those two words kept going in. That stranger. That stranger. Somebody working a blade, slow, all the way through.

I curled up on the bed with that ridiculous ultrasound crushed in my fist. The doctor stood at the foot of it and frowned at my labs. "Your numbers are bad." "Anemia. Malnutrition.

Your stomach's a mess. Depression. You nearly lost the baby." "Where's the father? Give him a call. The two of you should decide together.

Keep it or don't." I swallowed down everything that wanted to come up, and I closed my eyes. "Don't bother. The baby doesn't have a father." The baby was an accident.

One night, months back, Julian came home drunk. Julian, who never drank. He had me against the wall in the entryway before the door was even shut. Ten years of wanting him.

I didn't say no. One time. That was all it took. Lying in that hospital bed, I did something I couldn't explain to myself.

I opened Odette Beaumont's account and scrolled back to that date. "Farewell" had gone trending that night. Her piece.

The one strangers would spend years calling the most beautiful thing anyone ever made about love.

At the end of the caption she'd written: Her: [You're the cure and you're the way home.] Her: [A thousand miles between us tomorrow, and I'll still grow old with you.] That was the night he made his decision.

That was the night he let her go. The two of them said goodbye to each other across a whole country, on a screen the size of a hand. And I thought he was loving me.

I pushed myself up off the bed. I wiped my face. It didn't feel like anything. "Doctor.

I don't want it." "Can you schedule the procedure, please." My body being what it was, the doctor put the procedure two weeks out. Two weeks. I filed the number away.

It was also the deadline I was giving ten years of my life. He told me to focus on getting my strength back and to stop thinking so much. So I put my work on hold.

The empty hours were enough to work out where I was going. I was going to end the engagement. Not yet. My research was one step from done, and that last step needed Julian.

The day I decided, I dragged myself over to the Sheridan house to feel it out. I was still at the door when I heard his mother. "Julian.

Have you forgotten what you promised Wren's grandfather?" Chapter 5