The Reading of the Will
The Guest in Green

Two Years of Lies

August 25, 2026 · Part 4 of 10 · 2 min

Roz didn't hand the phone back. She scrolled.

She told herself she should stop — that whatever was in that thread would only make the wound deeper — but her thumb kept moving anyway, dragging the conversation upward through months, then a full year, then further, the messages thinning out but never disappearing, a pulse that never fully stopped.

A message from fourteen months ago: *Can't talk long, she's in the next room.* Roz remembered that week. She'd been picking out invitation samples alone at the kitchen table while Weston was "on a call."

A message from eight months ago, the week of their engagement party: *I saw the pictures online. You looked happy. I'm glad.* And his reply, sent forty minutes later: *I am happy. I just wish it didn't feel like I was choosing between two things I can't lose.*

Roz's hands had started shaking so hard the phone rattled against the china.

"You told me it ended two years ago," she said, not looking up. "You told me it ended before we even met."

"Roz —"

"You let me plan a wedding for a year while you were —" She couldn't finish the sentence. Behind her she heard Priya's sharp intake of breath, heard her father's chair finally scrape all the way back as he stood fully.

Then her thumb landed on one message that made the room tilt sideways.

Sent six weeks ago. From Weston.

*I'll tell her after the wedding. I promise. I just need to get through this one day first. Please trust me.*

Roz read it three times, as if repetition might change the words underneath her eyes. It didn't. Six weeks ago, he had known Delphine was pregnant. Six weeks ago, he had chosen — deliberately, in writing, with a plan and a timeline — to marry Roz first and confess after, as though his own wedding were an item on a checklist standing between him and a conversation he didn't want to have.

She looked up at him. Two hundred guests had gone utterly silent, phones half-raised now, no one bothering to hide it anymore.

"You were never going to end it," she said. "You were going to keep both of us."

And from two seats down, in a voice gone suddenly small, Constance Cade said, "Weston, I told you to end this before today."

Continue the story Part 5: Someone Already Knew →

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