His Stand-In Wife

Blood ran down my thighs. I hit the bottom of the stairs hard enough to hear it. His first love stood at the top and watched me bleed. She took her time with it.

Three years married in secret. Everyone called my husband a saint, and I believed them. Then a video of him kissing her in the back of his car went everywhere.

So he could lose control after all. Just never with me. I found out later that the marriage took more than three years from me.

His first love killed my father, the only family I had left.

In the hospital bed, I brought the divorce papers down flat against his chest. "Don't do this." His hand clamped around mine, shaking. "The baby needs a father." I pried his fingers off, one at a time. "No thanks.

I'll take the child and leave the father." Chapter 1 Ten minutes before the video of Cassian Callahan kissing Celeste Rhodes hit the internet, I was standing at a podium telling three hundred reporters I was done acting.

I'd won Best Actress four weeks earlier. The room came apart. Microphones came at my face. "Ms.

Vance, can you tell us why you're walking away?" "You were photographed leaving an OB's office. Are you pregnant?" "Who's the father?" I lifted my chin and smiled for the cameras.

My hand settled on the small curve of my stomach. I opened my mouth to answer all of it. Somebody in the back made a sound. "Check trending.

Celeste Rhodes has a boyfriend." My eyelid twitched. The room turned away from me all at once. Nora got a hand around my arm, walked me backstage, and put her phone in my hand.

The clip was four seconds long. Rain. The back window of a Maybach, halfway down. Celeste in a pale silk slip dress, folded into a man's lap, tipping her mouth up to his.

His hand spread across her waist. A rosary wound around his wrist, the beads worn smooth. Four seconds.

It was enough. [TheSweetheartAndTheSaint] [CelesteAndCassian] [HeNeverBrokeHisVowsUntilHer] All three went straight past my retirement and took the top three slots in entertainment. "She took your endorsements." Nora lit a cigarette backstage, where she absolutely was not allowed to. "She took your roles.

Now she's taking your news cycle." Smoke came out of her in a hard line. "Marlowe. Your husband's old money too, isn't he? Have him make one call.

Let's see how brave she is then." I didn't say anything. The screen went dark on its own. My face came up in the glass, white as paper.

It took me a while to get the words out. "My husband is Cassian Callahan." Three years. Married in secret. Not one headline, until now. A soft tap. Nora's cigarette hit the floor.

Almost nobody in the business knew I was Cassian Callahan's wife. The Callahans had decided I was a golddigger who trapped him, so they sealed the marriage to protect the name.

That isn't what happened. Three years ago I got invited to a party I didn't want to go to. Afterward a producer worked his way over with two glasses of champagne. I drank mine.

There was GHB in it. By the time he had me in the elevator I could feel my own pulse in my teeth. I dug my nails into my palm until the pain cut a hole in the fog, and I got loose.

The door next to his was open a crack. I went through it. "Help. Please." I made it as far as the corner and folded up there. Whatever sound I was making, I couldn't stop it.

A man came out of the bathroom, drunk, and looked at me for a long moment. Then he crossed the room and pulled me in. "So you came back." His breath went hot across my ear.

I never got to answer. He kissed me. Morning came in white and flat across the sheets. I finally got a clear look at him. Cassian Callahan. Heir to Callahan Holdings.

Cold by nature, famously disciplined. The papers called him the Saint of Fifth Avenue. He hadn't been a saint at all last night.

I picked my clothes up off the floor and got out of there. A onenight thing. I figured I'd never see him again. He was outside my apartment that afternoon. "Ms. Vance. I apologize.

I'd had too much to drink." Then he asked for my account number and wired five hundred thousand dollars into it. "I'll make this right," he said. "That's what it costs to marry you." Chapter 2 The day we signed the license at City Hall, I asked him why he'd decided to go through with it.

Oldmoney Catholic upbringing, he said. You ruin a girl, you marry her. I smiled at that. I thought it meant he was a decent man.

I thought marrying him might not be the worst thing that could happen to me. It took me until that afternoon backstage to understand. He married me out of guilt.

Celeste Rhodes and I look alike. He was drunk. He thought I was her. That's the whole story of my wedding night. I blinked until the room came back.

I picked Nora's cigarette up off the floor.

Then I took the ultrasound printout out of my pocket, and I dropped them both in the trash. "What are you doing?" She grabbed for the can. "You're not going to tell him you're pregnant?" I didn't answer.

Her phone lit up again on the counter. A live feed. Celeste, doing press. Still in the pale silk dress. And on her wrist, a rosary. I knew that rosary. It was his mother's.

The one thing she left him. He was supposed to give it to the woman he spent his life with. I asked him for it once.

I made a joke out of it first, so it wouldn't cost me anything when he said no. He said no. It was on Celeste Rhodes's wrist. Something in my face moved. It wasn't a smile.

She beamed down the lens and turned the beads with her thumb. Slow. Like she didn't know she was doing it. "Ms. Rhodes, is that from Mr.

Callahan?" asked a reporter who already knew. "It is." She bit her lip and did shy. "But Cass and I are just friends right now." "Friends who kiss?" She nodded.

Her eyes went wet on cue. "That's on me. I was young and stupid.

We had a fight and I left the country to study acting and I didn't even say goodbye." Her voice got smaller. "So somebody tell Cass to stop being angry with me. I mean.

We already kissed…" The comments went with her. All of them. [Mr.

Callahan FORGIVE HER] [they're perfect and nobody can tell me otherwise] [justice for celeste, she was a KID] "That shameless little—" Nora said. "Does she not know he's married?" She knew.

The first film Celeste took after she came home, she took opposite me. We wrapped late one night and she caught me in the hotel hallway. "Mrs.

Callahan." She said it like a test she already had the answers to. "Married life treating you well?" I didn't understand the question.

Before I could ask, she smiled and walked away. That was the same night my husband came to my set. Three years of cold. Three years of never asking how I was.

And that night he drove two hours out of the city to find me. The walls in that hotel were thin. I bit down on my own mouth to keep quiet.

He wound the end of my hair around one finger. His voice came out wrecked. "Baby. Come on.

Open up…" Three years married and it was the first time he'd called me anything but Marlowe. I was so happy I couldn't think straight.

I thought it meant he was finally letting me in. I never thought about who was staying in the room next to mine. Thin walls. He drove all that way to make sure she heard it.

He never wanted me. Not once. I was three months pregnant when I finally understood that. I'd planned to tell him after the press conference. I had the words ready and everything.

He was going to be somebody's father. The video got there first. I used to think he was just cold. That there was nothing in him to reach, and it wasn't personal.

Turns out he could lose control after all. Just never with me. Three years of my life, and it was a joke somebody else had been telling.

The tears came up before I could stop them and took my makeup with them. Through all of it, a pair of polished shoes came into focus.

Cassian stood over me with his hands in his pockets, looking down. His voice didn't move at all. "Marlowe. So you know." Chapter 3 I knew why he'd married me.

I knew why he'd been the way he was, all three years of it. I wiped my face with the back of my hand. I stood up.

I slapped him hard enough to turn his head. "Cassian," I said. "You really are a bastard." I scheduled the abortion for the following week. Nora knew. Nobody else did. Not him.

He was standing in the OB wing when I came around the corner on the day of. He looked at me for a few seconds.

Then his eyes went down, slow, to my stomach. "Why didn't you tell me you were pregnant." It came out of me as almost a laugh. "Why would I?" "I'm the father." Flat. No heat in it.

He was reading me a fact off a page.

Something snapped loose in my chest. "Men who cheat on their wives don't get to be fathers." That one landed. "Don't make a scene, Marlowe." A scene. That's what he called it.

The clinic was private, the kind with security in the lobby and nobody in the halls who wasn't paying to be there. Our voices carried anyway. A nurse looked up from her station.

I pulled my cap down and pushed my sunglasses up my nose. Then they called my name. My turn. I got past him and started for the exam room.

Two steps in, the floor went out from under me. He had me up off it, against his chest. "Are you finished." He looked down at me. "Be angry at me.

The baby didn't do anything to you." He wasn't being gentle about it and I couldn't get loose, so I hit him instead. "What is wrong with you?

You want a baby, divorce me and go make one with Celeste. Who asked you to have an opinion about my—" The sentence ended in a sound. He'd let go.

I landed in the back seat of the Maybach. This seat. Four seconds of video. Rain on the glass. Her mouth going up to meet his. My stomach came up into my throat.

He didn't look at my face at all. He took my chin in his hand and kissed me. I tasted copper. He'd bitten my lip open.

Three years, and it was the first time I'd ever made him lose control of anything. He laughed, low and mean. "Divorce. Marlowe, you can forget it." Someone knocked on the window.

Celeste was standing outside the glass with all the color gone out of her. Her voice broke coming through it. "Cass. What are you saying?

If you don't divorce her, then what am I?" It was early fall. The rain came down out of nowhere and it came down cold. She stood in it and waited for her answer.

Her hair went dark and flat against her shoulders. Then, right on schedule, she sneezed. His jaw moved. He reached for the door.

I knew that look. "Fine," I said. "We don't have to divorce." He stopped. "But you're going to give me three things." Out of the corner of my eye, Celeste's hands closed into fists.

I smiled. "One. You announce the marriage. Publicly. "Two. She apologizes to me in front of everyone, and she uses the word. Homewrecker. "Three.

When she's done, she disappears out of my life and she stays gone." Nobody said anything for a long time. He didn't answer. Celeste couldn't take her eyes off his face.

Chapter 4 They hadn't ended well, the two of them. Celeste was the kind of girlfriend who fought over nothing and threatened to leave over less. Going dark for a week was a hobby.

He always came and found her. The last time, she got on a plane. He didn't chase her. He married me instead. Three years on, she knew he'd never gotten over her.

What she didn't know was what I was worth to him. She was scared. Scared he'd say yes to me.

Scared he was done with her. "Well?" I said. "Made up your mind?" That did it. "Why would I apologize to you?" She turned on me and the sweet thing went straight out of her face. "Haven't you heard?

The one he doesn't love is the real other woman." Rain ran off her chin. "So you married Cass. So what.

There hasn't been one day in three years he didn't think about me." She lifted her hand and waved it in front of my face so I'd get a good long look at the rosary. "A family heirloom, and you never got to wear it once.

You're a pretty bad Mrs. Callahan, aren't you." The old me would have gone down under that. I just looked at her. In my pocket, my thumb pressed down. Keep going, I thought.

Say more. She saw my hand move. "Cass!" Her finger came up, shaking. "She's recording. She's recording!" He looked at me. I looked back.

Neither of us said anything for a long moment. Then he put his hand out. "Give me the phone." I didn't move.

Celeste came around the car, hauled the door open, and started digging through my pockets. My hand came up to hit her and stopped in the air.

He had my wrist. "I'm sorry, Marlowe." He said it quietly, like that made it better. "I can't let you destroy Cece. Her career's just getting started." Cece.

Listen to how easy that came out of him. He knew exactly what that recording would do to her if it got out. He knew better than anybody alive. So he picked.

He picked her, and I got to eat it. When the file was gone, Celeste threw the phone back at me. It hit my stomach. The breath went out of me.

Something moved behind his eyes, fast, and then his hands were on me before he'd decided to move them. "What is it?

Are you hurt?" Then, over his shoulder, at her: "Are you blind?" It was probably the first time he'd ever raised his voice at her. She froze.

It took a few seconds for the tears to catch up. "Cass. I didn't mean to." He ignored her. His palm went flat and careful over my stomach. "Baby.

Is it here?" The name, three years late. The concern, three years late. I knocked his hand off me. I made my mouth do something like a smile. "Don't touch me.

You make me sick." Sick. It went into him. I watched it land. Something in his face opened up for about a second, and then it closed, and then it froze over. He was done with me.

He got out of the car, crossed to her, and pulled her in against his coat. "Cece. That was my fault. I shouldn't have snapped at you. Don't cry." She cried harder.

And over his shoulder, through all of it, she smiled at me. See? He picked me. Chapter 5 She poured herself against him and put her mouth up under his ear. "Cass.

I know you still love me." "It was my fault before. I know that. I had an awful temper and I'd disappear on you every time we fought. Don't be angry.

Please forgive me." "That night you slept with her, I was in the room next door. I heard all of it. It broke me." "Don't ever do that to me again.

Okay?" He looked at me while he answered her. He took her hand. "Okay.

I promise." Then he lifted her up and set her down in the passenger seat, careful with her the way he had never once been with me. I got put out on the curb.

I stood there in the road like a punchline.

The window came down as they pulled away. "The Callahans sit on the board of every private hospital in the state," he said. "Go ahead and book yourself in somewhere.

See who's willing to do it." I didn't move. That was how he'd found me today. He owns the building. Cassian Callahan. What a piece of work you turned out to be. The rain got worse.

I stood on that curb for half an hour before Nora's car came around the corner.

She took one look at me, soaked through and gray in the face, and handed back a dry towel and a thermos of hot ginger tea.

She watched me in the mirror. "Last time you went to the county hospital for a scan, a photographer got you on the way out.

The whole internet spent a week guessing which producer knocked you up. Half of them are still saying you slept your way to that Oscar." "So you went private instead.

And private turns out to be his. What are you going to do?" I dried my hair and let myself sink back into the seat. I didn't answer her. My phone went off.

Celeste had posted. [Back with my first love.] One photo. Two hands, fingers laced. There was no question at all whose hand it was.

The replies were a wall of congratulations. [they're back together I'M OBSESSED] [y'all the saintandsinner fanfic is REAL and the girl is a movie star] [GET MARRIED. RIGHT NOW.

I'll drag a judge over there myself] One of my own antis had gone and left her a comment. [LMAOOO queen behavior, career AND love. meanwhile Pity Oscar Vance is out here pregnant with some sugar daddy's bastard. what a whore] Last month.

The Academy Awards. Celeste and I were both up for Best Actress. The Academy decided I was better. Her fans didn't take it. Rigged, bought, arranged, take your pick.

They started calling me the Pity Oscar and it stuck. My public goodwill went off a cliff. She picked up a lot of my endorsement deals on the way down. I never made anything of it.

I didn't feel like being patient anymore. I unlocked my phone. I opened my camera roll. I scrolled all the way back to a photo I had kept in there for three years