The Reading of the Will
The Guest in Green

The Perfect Toast

August 25, 2026 · Part 1 of 10 · 2 min

Windmere Manor smelled like six hundred white roses and warm candle wax, and Rosalind Hartley had never been happier to smell anything in her life. She sat at the head table in ivory lace, her hand laced through Weston Cade's, watching her father lift his champagne glass with a shake she pretended not to notice.

"To my girl," Gerald Hartley said, voice cracking. "Who finally found someone who deserves her."

The room applauded. Roz laughed, pressing her forehead briefly to Weston's shoulder. Under the table, his phone buzzed against his leg — again. He silenced it without looking, the practiced motion of a man who'd done it all night.

"Work?" Roz asked, teasing.

"Nothing," he said, and kissed her knuckles. "Nothing that matters more than this."

His mother, Constance Cade, sat two seats down in dove-gray silk, dabbing at dry eyes with a monogrammed handkerchief. "Finally," she said, loud enough to carry, "my son settles down." There was something underneath the word *finally* that Roz didn't have the tools yet to hear.

The quartet slid into something slow. Weston pulled Roz onto the floor, one hand warm at the small of her back, and for three full minutes the two hundred guests, the caterers, the flickering candles, all of it dissolved into just his face tipped down toward hers.

"I love you," he said. "Only you. You know that."

"I know," she said, and meant it completely.

That was when the manor's tall double doors at the far end of the ballroom groaned open, letting in a gust of cold September air that guttered half the candles at once. The quartet's cellist lost her bow stroke mid-phrase. Two hundred conversations died within seconds of each other, the way a held breath dies.

A woman stood in the doorway in a fitted emerald dress, one hand resting flat and protective against a belly rounded far past the point of hiding it. Her eyes swept the room once, found the head table, and stopped.

"Weston," she said. Her voice wasn't loud. It didn't need to be. In that silence, it reached every corner of Windmere Manor.

Continue the story Part 2: A Name From the Past →

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