4. Zara
ZARA
I should’ve walked away the night it happened. Should’ve burned that place down when my father set me up to be raped by Chadwick. That awful night. Nothing good happened at the Club. First Chadwick, then Sterling. Was I only meant to be used and abused by men?
Poverty doesn’t give me many options, so, unfortunately, I was going to have to suck it up.
Pain just teaches you how to compartmentalize.
And I learned real fast how to make silence feel like safety.
Healing costs money. Peace costs privilege.
And I hadn’t earned either yet. So I stayed. Fine, then I’d hunt the truth myself.
I wasn’t working this wedding because I loved the romance. I was here because I didn’t have the privilege to choose better. I should’ve quit long ago, long before my soul calcified into something brittle and bitter. But I needed the money, and no one else would hire me in this town.
Not after the estrangement with my father.
He was the good guy. A slick talker. And I didn’t want to run into him today.
I hoped I wouldn’t anyway. I would fade into the background of this wedding, bolt, and get back home in time to roll myself up like a burrito in my blankets, before crashing to sleep.
I’d barely stepped into the banquet hall when I saw her. She’d waited five public months of widowhood, before trading black lace for pearl-white satin.
Did Sterling lie, or was my father here somewhere? Was he going to confront me after I ghosted him, and didn’t follow his orders? I didn’t know what I would say to him if he did.
The bride was walking around smiling about her big day.
Madeline Kingsley.
She looked like she’d seen a ghost. Her smile dropped. Her eyes scanned me, no, peeled at me, like my presence was some unspoken offense. She stepped back, as if my coils carried a contagion. As if my very being shrunk her spotlight.
“You’re… working?” she asked, voice sharp enough to draw blood.
“Yes.”
Her gaze narrowed. “Do you have to wear your hair like that? It’s just… kind of distracting.” Her voice had the cadence of practiced civility, crisp vowels and cold undertones, like every country club wife who ever told me to smile more, while handing me a soiled napkin.
There it was. The soft microaggression, spoken in a wedding-white whisper. Not loud enough to get her in trouble, but just clear enough to remind me who she thought I was; less than. Just a server. Just a black girl with big hair, and bigger nerve for showing up in the room without shrinking.
I smiled, small and tight.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m not the one on display.”
Her cheeks turned the color of cheap rosé, but I didn’t wait for her to find her words again. I walked off, head high, bun tight, curls proud.
She could choke on her discomfort.
I was done making myself small, so other people could feel big. This wasn’t the first time she’d commented about my hair at the club. I took pride in my hair care. I wasn’t a nail girl. I was a hair girl, and, from its growth, it showed.
Still, I ducked into the bathroom, seething, bracing.
Not to erase myself, but to reassert who I was.
My coils weren’t unruly, they were testimony.
A lineage of resistance spun around my crown.
I didn’t want more problems. I needed people to tip me.
And on some level, I knew someone would say something. I’d hoped it was different.
Natural hair had its own rules, its own care.
The world didn’t always understand it, but I did.
I grabbed my brush and carefully smoothed my edges with gel, working my hair into a sleeker bun.
My coils were tight, thick, and resistant, just like me.
The soft bristles of my boar brush coaxed my strands into obedience, but only because I allowed it.
Water, oil, cream, the holy trinity of keeping my hair moisturized and thriving. My fingers moved swiftly, twisting my hair into a taut bun at the nape of my neck.
I used to hum when I braided my hair.
Little melodies. Songs I composed in my head.
Mom would say, “Z, that tune could crack the clouds.”
I believed her. Back then, I believed everything.
Especially in music.
The last time I played was at the spring recital. Vivaldi. I wore blue velvet, and my heart beat louder than the applause I should’ve gotten. Instead, ridiculed and humiliated, I couldn’t bear to touch my instrument again.
Every now and again, I caught myself humming a tune that had no words, but it wasn’t the same. Without my violin, without my music, I felt lost in the darkness.
And the silence swallowed me whole.
I shouldn’t think about that. I shook off the nostalgia and kept getting ready. It was muscle memory, a style I’d learned early. A protective style that kept me looking put together, while keeping the world from seeing too much of me. Neat, controlled, perfect.
I secured it with pins, smoothing down the baby hairs along my edges with a touch of gel. The sleekness was effortless, but I knew the work it took. black girls knew.
Once satisfied, I took a step back, staring at my reflection. Polished. Invisible. Just another worker blending into the background.
Just the way I needed to be. My hair was my resistance. But some days, I wished someone would touch it like it was beautiful. Like I was. Not to tame it. Just to see me. A nauseating train of thought.
My stomach roiled, reminding me that there’s been something off.
I glanced at the clock, and noted there was still a little bit of time. I hustled to the bathroom. I should’ve done this at home, but I was too rushed.
The club kept everything on hand that a guest would need at a moment’s notice. I swiped two tests from one of the storage closets full of different supplies at the club.
Now, I sat on the toilet waiting.
The blue lines appeared before I even set the test down on the toilet paper holder. Fuck. This couldn’t be real. I needed a second opinion. I had to get to a doctor. I needed confirmation through blood, because there was no way he knocked me up with his spawn.
I couldn’t waste any more time. I tucked the tests in the trash, wrapped in a ton of tissue paper like a used pad, and headed out of the stall to wash my hands. My chest ached. I told myself it was the corset, or maybe the shame, and shook it off.
I rushed to get to my post, before Tara caught wind that I wasn't where I needed to be.
The sky cracked open in shades of pink and bruised lilac, as I stepped onto the gravel path leading to the estate. Dew clung to the tips of freshly manicured hedges. A humming generator coughed behind the tented prep kitchen. Overhead, gulls cut through the quiet like gossip.
The wedding hadn’t started yet, but the chaos already had. The air smelled like salt and roses. Like lies dressed in white.
Inside, everything moved too fast.
People barked orders into headsets. Wait staff passed flutes of prosecco back and forth like ammunition. A florist crouched in the foyer, adjusting a six-foot installation of peonies with trembling hands.
One of the servers dropped a tray of crystal glasses. No one even flinched.
I walked through the prep hallway, hugging the wall like a ghost, and I smoothed down the skirt with shaky fingers. My thighs still trembled with the memory of him when I bent to tie my shoes as if it’d just happened.
I didn’t want to be here. But I was.
Because sometimes pride stings louder than pain, and I refused to beg for help to clean up this mess.
From the kitchen window, I could just barely see the ceremony starting on the lawn.
Music swelled, soft and hollow. Chairs rustled. Guests stood.
And there he was. My father. Standing at the altar in a tux that probably cost more than what I made in six months.
Then she appeared. Madeline Kingsley, no, Madeline Johnston now. The woman, who used to ice me out at sixteen, now stood at the center of everything I was excluded from. Her new last name didn’t matter. She still wielded the same power; old money privilege, with a hint of practiced cruelty.
I held the tray tighter.
No one looked back. No one noticed the girl behind the serving station, watching her father promise forever, to the woman who used to laugh when I scrubbed vomit out of the marble floor.
They toasted while I filled glasses.
I didn’t cry.
I didn’t move.
I just poured.
A knock on the prep room door startled me.
“Zara, you’re on the terrace bar,” someone called. “The bride's already in the suite.”
I swallowed the bile rising in my throat.
The bride.
Sterling’s mother, my now evil stepmother.
I didn’t know how the world expected me to stand in front of that woman again, and pour her champagne, without shattering the bottle across the floor.
But I would.
Because I didn’t cry anymore.
I moved.
The terrace gleamed with candlelight and ivory ribbon. Florals stretched like cathedrals; too big, too loud, too white.
Every table was a shrine to excess: gold-rimmed chargers, embossed menus, and linen napkins folded into origami birds.
Guests arrived slowly, like royalty. Women in gowns that shimmered like oil. Men with watches that cost more than my rent for the year.
I kept my head down and poured. Bubbly. Rosé. Top shelf whiskey.
“Don’t let their glasses get low,” Tara warned me, sliding past with a tray of sugared figs.
“Got it,” I said.
I didn’t feel him walk in.
Like fog creeping in under the door. Like heat radiating off a closed oven.
I looked up, tray in hand, and there he was.
My new fucking stepbrother.
His suit fitted like armor. His hair cropped into a precise taper-fade, the tight curls at the crown melting into bare skin at the nape, every edge razor-sharp. Smile too slow to be real.
He wasn’t looking at the guests.
He was watching me. Smugness flew across his face before being buried behind a cold exterior mask.
Like he’d known I’d be here. Like he’d planned it.
I should’ve turned around.
But I moved forward.