After My Groom Helped His Ex Fight Cancer

The champagne tower was my idea.

Three tiers of crystal flutes, backlit in warm gold, positioned at the center of the rooftop so that every guest who stepped off the elevator would see it first. A statement. A signal. Tonight, everything is exactly as it should be.

I stood near the east railing with a glass I hadn't touched, watching Manhattan spread out below us like something that belonged to me. Three hundred people filled the space behind me — old money and new money and the kind of money that doesn't discuss itself — all of them here because it was my birthday and because being seen at a Marshall event still meant something in this city.

Twenty-eight years old. I didn't feel it. I felt the same way I always felt at these things: alert, composed, and very slightly outside my own body.

"You're doing the thing," Wes said beside me.

I didn't look at him. "What thing?"

"The thing where you smile at everyone and look at no one."

I turned then. He was in a black suit, no tie, his jaw clean-shaved and his dark eyes doing what they always did — taking in the room with the kind of quiet attention that most people mistook for boredom. Wes Carter was never bored. He was always watching.

"It's called hosting," I said.

The corner of his mouth moved. Not quite a smile. With Wes, it never quite was.

That was the thing about us, the thing that looked like intimacy from the outside and felt like something else entirely from where I was standing. We were good together in public. Seamlessly, convincingly good. He knew when to put his hand at the small of my back. I knew when to laugh at exactly the right moment. Three years of practice had made us fluent in a language that meant nothing in private.

I had proposed to him. That part people didn't know. When my father cut me off — publicly, deliberately, in front of the family's inner circle — I had walked out of that room and called Wes Carter's office before I reached the elevator. I told him I wanted a strategic engagement. A merger of appearances. I told him it made sense for both of us.

He said yes the same afternoon.

I told myself it was business. I had been telling myself that for three years.

The string quartet shifted into something slower, and I turned back to the room. That was when I saw the waitress.

She was moving too fast, weaving between clusters of guests with a tray of champagne flutes, and she caught the edge of a chair. The tray tilted. One glass slid, and she grabbed for it, and in the scramble her elbow caught the sleeve of the man beside her — Wes.

It was nothing. A brush of contact. The kind of thing that happens at every event, that gets a quick apology and a laugh and