Someone Already Knew

The words landed harder than anything on Delphine's phone.

Roz turned slowly toward her almost-mother-in-law. "What did you just say?"

Constance's composure, so carefully maintained through two hundred witnesses and a public unraveling, finally gave way. Her hands trembled around the handkerchief. "I didn't know it would come to this. I told him — I begged him — to handle it before the wedding, one way or another."

"You knew." Roz's voice climbed. "You knew about her. About the baby. And you let me walk down that aisle two hours ago."

"I knew he was still seeing her," Constance said. "I found out in the spring. I thought — I hoped he'd end it. He swore to me he would."

Gerald Hartley crossed to his daughter's side in three long strides, one hand landing protective on her shoulder. "You knew for five months," he said to Constance, disbelief hardening into something colder, "and you let your son marry my daughter anyway."

"I thought once the wedding happened, once things were settled —" Constance stopped herself, hearing how it sounded even as she said it.

"Settled," Delphine repeated, and for the first time she turned her attention fully on Constance rather than Weston. "Is that what you called it, when you offered me money in April to disappear before June?"

A fresh ripple went through the crowd. Somewhere near the bar, someone actually gasped audibly, and no one bothered to shush them.

"You paid her to stay quiet," Roz said slowly, piecing it together in real time, watching her entire wedding rearrange itself into something with actors and a script she'd never been shown. "And when that didn't work, you just... hoped. You hoped hard enough that you let it happen anyway."

"Roz, please," Weston said, reaching for her hand. "None of that matters. What matters is you and me, right now —"

She pulled her hand back before he could touch it.

"Don't," she said. "Don't you dare try to make this about us right now."

Behind her, Priya's phone was already lifted, recording — not for spite, Roz would understand later, but because Priya had seen the way three different guests already had their own phones up, livestreaming to accounts with thousands of followers, and someone needed to control what story got told first.

Weston saw the phones too. His expression shifted, fast, from panic into something more calculating. "Everyone, please — let's take this somewhere private —"

"No," Roz said. "You wanted a public wedding. You'll get a public ending."