Part 3
I watched him pace the length of the expensive rug.
“And the proposal?” I asked, keeping my voice deliberately neutral. “How do you plan to choreograph that for your audience?”
Marcus didn’t miss a beat. “Dinner at the Thompson rooftop,” he said, looking past me toward the windows. “I kept checking my coat pocket all through the tasting menu to make sure the jeweler’s box was still there. I was sweating through my shirt. Then, right as they brought out the espresso, I dropped to one knee. The whole dining room clapped.”
It was flawless. A perfectly sterile recitation of the night he had asked me to marry him.
My throat felt like it was closing, but I forced the words out. “The waiter brought us a bottle of vintage Bollinger,” I whispered. “You couldn’t stop tearing up. I called Evelyn from the back of the town car just to say the words out loud. That is my memory, Marcus. You are stripping the marrow out of my life to give it to her.”
Marcus stopped pacing. The defensive hostility returned, hardening his features. “This is what this is actually about. It’s not about the reunion. It’s about you and Chloe.”
“Excuse me?”
“You’ve been competing with her since middle school,” he said, gesturing toward the couch where my sister sat. “She got the looks, the easy charm, the attention. You got the grades. You’ve spent thirty years trying to prove you’re superior to her, and you can’t stand that for one single night, I need her instead of you.”
I sat perfectly still in the velvet chair. “I am asking why my husband is training my sister to be his wife.”
“Because I asked her to help me fix a complicated situation, and she didn’t turn it into a cross-examination!” His voice spiked, echoing off the high ceiling. “I have to walk into a room full of successful guys and pretend I didn’t peak at twenty-two. Do you know how exhausting that is? But no, let’s center the narrative around Elena’s feelings. Let’s talk about how hard this is for the junior partner.”
“You built the lie, Marcus. Not me.”
“And I’m trying to manage the fallout without blowing up my reputation. But after everything I do for this household, you can’t give me an inch.”
“Everything you do for this household?” I repeated.
Before Marcus could answer, Chloe leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees. “He provides the emotional stability here, Elena. He’s the one waiting for you when you come back completely burned out. He manages the mental load of the house so you can focus on billing hours.”
She delivered this assessment with the confident cadence of a human resources rep. I looked from her perfectly highlighted hair to the entryway console table behind her. Sitting on top of the mail pile was a pink shut-off warning from Seattle Public Utilities because Marcus had forgotten to log into the payment portal for three consecutive months. He hadn’t held a W-2 in three years.
“I already talked to mom about the reunion,” Chloe added, taking another sip of her coffee.
I focused on the ceramic rim of her mug, trying to anchor myself to a physical object. “You discussed my marriage with Evelyn before I even knew this was happening?”
“I needed a second opinion,” Chloe said, completely unfazed. “Mom gets it. She said you’d probably take it too personally, but that it’s actually kind of sweet Marcus cares so much about his friends’ opinions.”
Marcus crossed his arms, looking down at me with a triumphant smirk. “There it is. Your own mother understands the pragmatism. Your sister is stepping up to help. You are the only person in this family trying to make this a tragedy.”
He tilted his head, studying me like a specimen in a jar. “What does that tell you, Elena?”
I stared at the three of them—the husband I funded, the sister I carried, and the mother I apparently couldn’t trust. I had a dozen answers, but none of them mattered. They had already written me out of the script.