Chapter 38
ELIZA
Iwas sitting on the edge of the bed in the guest room at Nate and Kate’s condo, staring at my hands like they might suddenly help me make sense of things. Instead, they just sat there staring back at me, attached to my body but emotionally unhelpful.
Everything still felt surreal, like I’d stepped into someone else’s life by accident and nobody had noticed yet. Here I was, in a foreign city, in a strange condo, about to marry a man who apparently came in two interchangeable versions.
I let out a soft, hysterical sound that might’ve been a laugh. After forcing myself to take a breath, a quiet knock sounded from the door and I froze for second, hoping no one had heard my unhinged sound.
Kate had already rescued me from the emotional equivalent of a public execution. I didn’t need her to think she’d adopted a crazy person.
“Come in,” I called, mentally scrambling for an explanation that wouldn’t make me sound like I was even more in dire need of psychiatric help than she probably already thought I was.
As I looked up, however, for one disorienting second, my brain just stopped. Jesse—Will—was standing in the doorway. I didn’t even know what to call him anymore, but somehow, that felt like the least of my problems right now.
Our gazes met and he hesitated for another brief moment before he stepped inside, closing the door quietly behind him. The tension in the room, once we were sealed in together, was so thick that it was almost tangible.
“Hi,” he said softly, his hands in his pockets up to the first knuckle. He was wearing dark jeans and a fitted T-shirt, but even though I hadn’t seen him dressed so casually often, I still knew that it was him.
My Jesse—Will.
I nearly let out a soft whimper when I realized just how confusing this was going to be. Words suddenly felt ambitious, so I simply nodded my response, my throat tight and not particularly interested in cooperating.
He took a few steps further into the room, stopping a careful distance away from me. Not too close. Not too far. It gave me the impression that he’d thought through where he was going to stand.
That made sense, though. Whatever his name was, the man I’d come to know was nothing if not thoughtful—and a liar.
He swept his gaze across my well-appointed room, lingering on the window before looking at me again. “Thank you for not kicking me out the second you saw me. I know this has been a lot.”
I managed another nod, and for a few long moments, we were both quiet. Then he straightened a little like he’d made a decision. “I owe you an explanation.”
At this point, I doubted any explanation would be sufficient, but I supposed something was better than nothing at all, so I kept quiet, simply waiting for him to continue.
“When Alex and Dad first told Jesse that they intended to arrange a marriage for him, he was really distraught. He’d told them no, but they weren’t listening.”
My head tilted of its own accord. This didn’t seem like an explanation for why he’d lied to me, but I appreciated hearing it from the beginning, which was what I suspected this was. Will inhaled a breath deep enough to make his chest rise, slowly releasing it before he spoke again.
“Everything I told you about Jesse and me, about how our relationship has always worked was true, except that it was Jesse who was in the NICU for three months after our birth. Jesse who needed extra help growing up but breezed through it all like nothing could touch him. He’s the one who’s always been true to himself.
” He paused for a beat. “It was also that I’ve always felt like I needed to protect him and I’ve always gone out of my way to do it. ”
“So that’s why you did this?” I whispered the question, my eyes widening. “You wanted to protect your brother?”
He shrugged. “Yeah, I did, but I also wanted to protect my family. My dad. Alex. Jesse said no from the outset. He didn’t want this and he told them as much.
Repeatedly. My dad just—” He shook his head, sighed, and tried again.
“My dad just has very set ideas about certain things, and arranged marriages are one of those things, so he instructed Alex to continue with the arrangements while we worked on getting Jesse onboard.”
So shellshocked that I could barely speak, I just kept looking at him, my gaze skipping across the tense lines of his shoulders and the rigidity in his posture. It’s so familiar that it hurts.
“Jesse saw it coming,” he said. “The very next day, he was on a plane back to Miami, which is where he still lives, but you and your family had already arrived. The wheels were already in motion.”
My jaw finally unlocked, but it went in the opposite direction now, slackening until I was practically gaping at him.
I gestured vaguely between us, because I honestly didn’t have the vocabulary for this.
“So you just agreed to step in and pretend to be your brother for however it would take to convince Jesse to marry me?”
Those eyes cut back to mine, and for a beat, he just stood there, right in the center of the room with his dark hair as disheveled as if he hadn’t bothered fixing it since he’d run after me. “Yes, I did.”
“How could you?” The words were out of my mouth before I’d even thought about it. “How could you do that to me?”
“I didn’t really know you at the time,” he explained quietly, the corners of his eyes tightening with hurt. “I didn’t know what was going to happen. I just wanted to protect Jesse, like I always have, so I stepped in. It was supposed to be a temporary solution. I never thought it would last long.”
I felt like those words had taken my already broken heart and squeezed it a little, just to make sure to send yet another bolt of pain through me. “That’s your defense?”
“It’s not a defense, Eliza,” he said calmly. “It’s just the truth. What I did was wrong. I’m not trying to excuse it. I never would. I knew it was wrong and you have no idea how many times I almost told you, but protecting Jesse—”
“What did you need to protect him from so desperately that you’d do this to me?” I asked, my voice breaking. “Do this to us?”
“I had to protect him from being forced into something he didn’t want and wasn’t ready for.
I couldn’t let him be steamrolled into something he’d resent them for.
He’s my family, Eliza. My identical twin.
There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for the guy.
I really thought that this was best because it would also bring him back to us. ”
I let that information sit for a moment, turning it over in my head. “So instead, you let me be the one forced into something I didn’t understand.”
To his credit, Will didn’t avert his gaze from mine.
He didn’t argue, or interrupt, or try to reframe it.
He simply held my gaze and nodded again.
“Yeah, I did. I never meant to hurt you and I know that doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen, but I didn’t plan for any of it to go the way it did.
When I agreed to stand in for him, I thought it was going to be a couple days at most.”
A searing pain shot through my chest, like my heart had decided this was the moment to really commit to the emotional breakdown that had been looming all day. I finally looked away, bringing my gaze back to my unhelpful hands. If I kept looking at him, I might do something deeply embarrassing.
Like cry. Or forgive him. Or both, which is probably a dangerous combination.
“Jesse really isn’t a bad guy, Eliza. He’s not the bad guy in this situation, either. I need you to know that. He was clear about what he wanted and where he stood from the very beginning. I know you got a weird vibe from him at the engagement party, but give it time.”
I almost laughed, but not because it was funny. Rather it was because we were now discussing the moral character of the other version of the man I’d fallen in love with. He was trying to encourage me not to judge that guy for what had happened and to convince me to give him a chance.
Bloody hell, what a time to be alive.
“We were all victims here,” he said quietly.
I raised an eyebrow, scoffing softly. “Were we? That feels like a truly generous interpretation of the situation to me.”
He held my gaze. “Everything that happened between us was real. Everything except my name. I lied to you about that, but nothing else, and I know it’s going to be hard to take my word for it, but I hope that one day, you’ll see that it’s true.”
I so badly wanted to say no, it wasn’t real. I wanted to tell him that it couldn’t have been and that someone who’d built a relationship on a lie didn’t get to claim truth like that, but the problem was that it hadn’t felt like a lie.
Not when he looked at me the way he was even now. This man had taken care of me in a way no one else ever had. He’d seen me in a way no one had ever bothered to.
My throat tightened, but ultimately, he had, in fact, lied. For a long time. During which loads of things happened. “That doesn’t make it okay.”
“I know,” he said immediately with no trace of defensiveness or hesitation in his words or on his features. “I’m not asking you to forgive me. You deserved the truth. That’s why I’m here.”
Well, that, and to fall on your sword. It looked like that part of what I’d learned about him hadn’t changed.
What was worse was that just the one flicker of the man I’d thought I knew was enough to nearly tug at the last thread holding me together right now. I swallowed, forcing myself to speak past the lump growing in my throat. “I need you to leave.”
The light in his eyes dimmed just slightly, but he immediately took a single step back. “Okay.”
“I have to think,” I said, knowing that I didn’t owe him an explanation, but still. “There’s a lot to think about.”
“Yeah, there sure is.”
When he turned toward the door, something in my chest lurched.
This moment felt too final to be real and it flooded me with a sense of panic so extreme I could barely breathe.
I almost said his name—his real name. Almost asked him to stay, to wait, to just sit with me or hold me while I fell apart.
To prove that the safety of his arms hadn’t been a lie.
My lips even parted to do it, but no sound came out. As I watched, he reached for the door handle, but before he twisted it, he spoke without turning back to me. “You can pull out of this at any time, Eliza. You don’t have to marry him. I just thought you should know that.”
My eyes slid shut as he left. The knowledge that he was still trying to look out for me, even now, even after everything that’d happened, wedged itself like a weight in my chest. That was the man I knew. The one who wanted me to know that I had a choice and that I wasn’t trapped.
It was wonderful. Marvelous. Except I was trapped. I didn’t have a choice.
The castle needed this marriage and so did my family. This whole ridiculous, archaic arrangement wasn’t just about me deciding whether or not I trusted a man who had been lying to me or his twin.
It was so much bigger than that, and although I truly, fiercely wished right now it wasn’t true, our financial situation hadn’t changed. Neither had the fact that Eugenie and Winnie weren’t about to produce an heir—or even care about whether they ever did.
It was still up to me, just like it always had been.