For the third time, Aiden Cross walked his fiancée into my pre-wedding counseling office.
The girl was blushing furiously, and she leaned in to whisper, "Angela Knight, my fiancé treats me so well. What do I even do about it?"
I let two seconds pass. "So what is it, exactly, that you two want me to help you with?"
Aiden lounged in his chair, and at that he let out a low laugh.
"Nothing much. Just want to learn how to spoil a little princess properly."
He finished and tilted his head toward the girl beside him, his tone all wickedness and indulgence. "Last time I didn't take you to see the ocean, you cried like I'd dropped dead."
"This time I'll buy out every firework on South Isle. Is that apology enough?"
The girl's ears flushed scarlet in an instant.
I kept my head down, flipping through the counseling notes, bitterness spreading through my chest.
Because once, Aiden had spoiled me exactly the same way.
We'd gone from seventeen to twenty-four together.
But the day before our wedding, Aiden died.
I tried to follow him in death seventeen times and failed, and in the end I was forced to marry someone else.
And now that ex-boyfriend, dead for three years, sat in front of me with his arm around the scholarship girl I had funded and watched grow up with my own hands.
Aiden lowered his eyes, leafing through the file on my desk, and suddenly he smiled.
"And here I thought."
"That the wealthy family you scrambled so desperately to marry into, less than three years after your ex-boyfriend died," he raised his gaze, slow and deliberate, "would at least give you a glamorous life."
——
The day before our wedding, Aiden's plane went down. No word, nothing.
To find him, I rushed through the night to the crash site.
I dug through the wreckage and never found a trace of him, my ten fingers torn to raw flesh, never able to hold a pen the same way again.
And now the scholarship girl I had funded and watched grow up had become the one who saved his life.
The last voice message he sent me was only "I love you," and then a violent explosion drowned it out.
Ever since, the sound of an explosion left me with severe post-traumatic stress.
Aiden rapped twice on the desk, jerking me back to the present.
He pushed his still-lit phone across to me.
A lurid headline paired with an attention-grabbing photo.
Classic tabloid gossip.
Except, under the neon glow, the man with his arm around the scantily dressed beauty was none other than my wealthy husband, Dylan Delgado.
Aiden leaned lazily against the back of his chair. "Mr. Delgado is truly blessed beyond words, marrying a traditional wife like you. Even in this day and age, he gets to enjoy the pleasures of a whole harem."
Calmly, I darkened the screen and gathered the files on my desk.
"Mr. Cross, this has nothing to do with today's session. If there's nothing else, the two of you are free to go."
Aiden arched a brow, amused, and leaned his upper body over the desk, closing in.
"Of course it has something to do with it."
"As a counselor, when your own marriage has rotted into this, what right do you have to counsel anyone else?"
"I have reasonable doubts about your competence now," he straightened up, smoothing his cuff. "I'll file a complaint with your supervisor. You'd better start packing up your things."
I clenched my fingertips, sinking back into the same helplessness as all those years ago.
I needed money. A great deal of money, to save a life.
One phone call from Aiden, and my supervisor was leading me down to stand before him and bow in apology.
Aiden settled back against the sofa, his eyes full of contempt.
"In that case, I'll grudgingly give you one more chance. Let's see your skills. Go on, win my fiancée over."
In silence, I took a tablet from the drawer, full of the wedding templates I'd once saved.
Back then Aiden would wrap his arms around me from behind, laughing that he'd throw me a hundred weddings.
That he'd let me experience every kind I loved.
But now the wedding was ready, and the bride was no longer me.
I held up the tablet and crouched beside Tracey Henson.
And one by one, I offered up the wedding gowns I had once imagined on my own body, for her to pick from.
