“This is entirely your fault! You have ruined us!”
“I didn’t write your speech, Carol. You chose the words. Now you get to choke on them.” I ended the call.
Ethan stared at me, his chest heaving. And then, he crossed a line from which there was no return.
“Annabelle,” he pleaded, his voice cracking. “I need you to log onto your accounts. I need you to draft a public statement defending my mother. Say the video was taken out of context. Say she was joking.”
I stared at the man I had married less than twenty-four hours ago, feeling a sickening jolt of absolute clarity.
He wasn’t asking me to save his family. He was demanding that I sacrifice mine.
Chapter 5: The Audit and the Ultimatum
I genuinely thought the exhaustion was making me hallucinate. I stared at Ethan, waiting for him to blink, to apologize, to recognize the profound insanity of his request.
He didn’t. He ran a trembling hand through his perfectly styled hair, his eyes wild with corporate desperation. “If you post a clarification, the bloggers will back off. If the bride defends the mother-in-law, the narrative changes. People will move on. Please, Annabelle. Just tell them she didn’t mean it the way it sounded.”
“Ethan,” I said, my voice dropping to a dangerously quiet register. “It sounded exactly the way she meant it. And everyone in that ballroom knew it.”
“You are letting your stupid pride destroy my family’s legacy!” he shouted, kicking the heavy wooden leg of the armchair.
“There’s that word again. Family.” I crossed my arms over my chest, feeling a cold, impenetrable armor forming around my heart. “We are operating with two entirely different definitions of that word. You want me to publicly lie to protect a woman who humiliated my parents in front of two hundred people?”
“You are choosing them over your own husband!”
“No,” I replied smoothly. “I am choosing basic human respect.”
I grabbed my car keys and walked out of the suite, leaving him standing amidst the wreckage of his panic.
I drove straight to my parents’ modest house in the suburbs. The contrast was jarring. There were no crystal chandeliers here, just the comforting smell of roasted garlic and the worn upholstery of the living room sofa. My mother had carefully unpacked the leftover floral arrangements I had sent home with them, placing the white orchids in cheap glass vases on the dining table as if it were just another ordinary Sunday afternoon.
