The Reading of the Will
The Guest in Green

What He Meant to Do

August 25, 2026 · Part 6 of 10 · 2 min

He grabbed her wrist — not hard, but enough — and pulled her three steps toward the side hallway, out of the worst of the crowd's direct line of sight, though nothing could pull them out of earshot anymore.

"Just give me sixty seconds," he said, low and fast. "Please. Let me explain what actually happened."

"You have sixty seconds," Roz said, arms crossed over the lace bodice she'd spent four months choosing.

Weston dragged a hand through his hair. "My father's company needed the merger with yours. You know that. I never — Roz, I did love you. I do. But when we got engaged, it was also... it was also the smart thing. For the business. For my father."

"You married the merger," Roz said flatly, "and kept her on the side."

"It wasn't like that at first." His voice cracked, and for a moment he looked less like a groom and more like a boy caught in something too large for him. "I really did try to end it with Delphine. Twice. But then in March she told me she was pregnant, and I—" He stopped.

"And you what?"

"I panicked," he said. "I didn't know how to have both conversations at once — telling you the wedding needed to stop, and telling my father the merger needed to stop, and telling her I'd be there for the baby. So I told myself I'd get through the wedding first. Handle one crisis at a time."

Roz stared at him, and something in her chest that had been in freefall since the double doors opened finally hit the ground, hard and final.

"You didn't panic," she said quietly. "You planned. You wrote her a message with a timeline, Weston. *After the wedding.* That's not panic. That's a strategy. You were going to marry me, keep the company happy, and keep her too, and just... manage all three of us like line items."

He didn't deny it. That was the answer, in the end — the silence, again, the same silence from the ballroom floor twenty minutes earlier, except now there was no crowd to perform for, and he still couldn't find the lie.

From the hallway's far end, Priya appeared, phone still in hand, her expression tight. "Roz. You need to come back out there. Now."

"What happened?"

Priya's eyes flicked once toward Weston, cold. "It's Delphine. Something's wrong."

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