Chapter Twelve — The Wedding That Wasnt
Zaire told her the truth. All of it, finally, four months too late for it to do either of them any good — that the man in the sash had been Ty, playacting so Zaire could have one night of being nobody's heir and nobody's fiancé; that the woman in the footage had walked into that VIP room to work and walked out with something neither of them had asked for; that he'd spent four months falling for a woman he'd lied to by omission every single day, and that the lie had gotten heavier every week he let it keep living, until it had gotten too heavy to carry and he'd dropped it the only way a coward drops something — by letting someone else find it first.
"I was going to tell her," he said, which was true, and which sounded, even to his own ears, exactly as pathetic as every man who has ever said it.
"When?" Sade asked. "Before or after you married me?"
He didn't have an answer for that. There wasn't one that didn't make him smaller.
"I don't hate you," Sade said, and that was the part that undid him more than anger would have.
"I think I might have hated you if you'd loved me and done this anyway.
But you didn't love me, Zaire. I don't think you ever did, not the way that woman got in four months what I couldn't get in six years.
I think you loved the idea of us. The photographs.
What our families built when they put us together.
I loved that too, if I'm honest. I just don't think either of us ever loved the actual person sitting across the dinner table. "
"Sade—"
"Don't," she said, not unkindly. "Don't apologize your way into making me the villain in your redemption story.
I'm not staying so you can feel guilty at me for the next forty years.
I'm ending this because I deserve someone who looks at me the way you looked at her in that footage, and I'm not going to get that from you, and I'd rather know that now than find out in year ten. "
The wedding was canceled six hours later, by a joint statement Sade's family's PR team drafted with brutal, professional efficiency, citing "irreconcilable circumstances" in language so smooth it gave away nothing and everything at once.
The city, which had spent two years being fed the Kingston-Bennett merger like a soap opera, exploded.
By morning it was local news. By that evening it was national gossip blogs, then business press speculating about what a called-off wedding meant for a pending joint venture between Kingston Global Logistics and the Bennett family's shipping interests — a deal worth, depending on which outlet you read, somewhere between eighty and two hundred million dollars, now very publicly dead in the water three days before it was supposed to be sealed with a marriage nobody outside the two families had ever pretended was purely romantic.
Elijah Kingston did not raise his voice.
That was, in some ways, worse than if he had.
He sat his son down in the same study where three generations of Kingston men had been told, in careful, controlled tones, exactly how badly they'd failed the family name, and he said the thing Zaire would carry for the rest of his life, whether or not he ever forgave his father for saying it.
"You embarrassed generations of this family over a stripper," Elijah said, and the word landed exactly as intended — small, dismissive, a whole human being reduced to a job title so it would hurt less to discard her.
"Her name is Kamiko," Zaire said, and it was the first time in his life he'd ever raised his voice back at his father, and something about doing it in her defense, when she wasn't even speaking to him, when she had every reason to hate him and no reason left to ever think of him kindly again, made him understand — too late, the way he understood most things, apparently — exactly how far gone he already was.
"I don't care what her name is," Elijah said. "I care about the joint venture we just lost. I care about eighty years of this family climbing out of the gutter your great-grandfather ran, and you throwing it back in with both hands over a woman you met four months ago in a strip club."
"I didn't throw anything anywhere," Zaire said. "I called off a marriage I never should have agreed to in the first place. That's not the same thing as burning down the family."
"Tell that to the Bennetts' lawyers."
"I'll tell it to whoever needs to hear it," Zaire said, and something in him — something that had been waiting, he'd realize later, since he was maybe nineteen years old — finally, fully snapped into place.
"I'm done marrying spreadsheets, Dad. I'm done pretending a merger with a nice family and a matching net worth is the same thing as a marriage.
I watched Grandma Ruby build something out of nothing with Granddad, and I've heard the stories about what they had, even after everything, even after he went legitimate and it cost them half of what they used to control.
You think that's what you and Mom have? You think that's what I was about to sign up for with Sade? "
Elijah didn't answer. He didn't need to. Some silences, Zaire was learning, said everything a person needed to know.