Chapter 1 The Girl With Everything to Lose
The breakfast table was a performance.
It had always been. Every morning in this house followed the same unspoken script… Gerald at the head of the table, newspaper open, reading glasses perched on his nose like a prop in a play he’d been directing for eleven years.
Margaux moving between the kitchen and the dining room with quiet careful steps, setting things down gently, occupying herself so she wouldn’t have to occupy any silence.
Vivienne already seated perfectly, wearing a smile that existed purely for decoration.
And me.
I poured my coffee and sat down without greeting anyone. Not out of rudeness… out of accuracy. Good mornings in this house were rarely good and we all knew it.
“You’re late,” Gerald said without looking up.
“By four minutes.” I wrapped both hands around my mug. “I think we’ll survive.”
Margaux’s movement in the kitchen slowed slightly. That was her version of holding her breath.
Gerald turned a page of his newspaper. He didn’t respond and that was somehow worse than if he had.
Gerald’s silences weren’t empty. They were deliberate… small precise punishments disguised as indifference.
Vivienne reached for the fruit bowl across the table.
“You look tired Sera.”
“I look exactly how I always look.”
“That’s what I meant.” She smiled over the rim of her glass.
I let it go. Picking a fight with Vivienne before eight in the morning was a waste of energy I didn’t have. She fed on reaction the way most people fed on breakfast and I’d stopped giving her the satisfaction somewhere around my nineteenth birthday.
Margaux came in from the kitchen and set a plate in front of me. Her hand brushed my shoulder as she passed — light, brief, the kind of touch that wanted to be more than it was.
I knew what it meant. It meant she loved me. It also meant she wasn’t going to do anything about whatever came next.
That was the thing about my mother. Her love was real and her courage was absent and somehow both things managed to exist in the same person without either one cancelling the other out.
“Be home by six tonight,” Gerald said. Still not looking up.
“I have evening classes on Thursdays.”
“Cancel them.”
I set my fork down. “I don’t think I will.”
The newspaper lowered. Just slightly. His eyes came up over the top of his reading glasses and found mine with the particular patience of a man who had never once needed to raise his voice to make a room comply.
“These are important guests,” he said. “Business associates. Your presence is required.”
“You have Vivienne for business dinners.”
“I need you specifically.”
Something about those three words made me look at him properly. Not the words themselves but the weight sitting underneath them. Deliberate. Settled. The weight of a man who had already made a decision and was only now informing you of it.
I held his gaze for a moment longer than was comfortable.
“Fine,” I said. “Six o’clock.”
He went back to his newspaper.
I went back to my coffee.
Vivienne smiled at nothing in particular and I pretended not to notice.
I should have pushed harder.
The moment I walked through the front door that evening and heard the voices coming from the sitting room I knew it. Too many of them. Too much careful laughter… the kind that people perform when they’re trying to make an impression on someone who matters.
Margaux appeared from the hallway before I’d even taken off my jacket. She had that look on her face. The one that meant something was already in motion and she was hoping softness could cushion whatever impact was coming.
“Just keep an open mind tonight,” she said quietly.
Something tightened low in my stomach. “About what?”
Her eyes moved toward the sitting room and back.
“Gerald only wants what’s best for you.”
Those words had never once preceded good news in this house.
“What did he do?” I asked.
She reached for my arm instead of answering.
I stepped past her and walked into the sitting room.
Eight people. Arranged across sofas and armchairs with the careful placement of a staged scene. Gerald stood near the fireplace looking entirely too comfortable.
Vivienne sat in the corner like a decorative accessory… present but uninvolved, which meant she already knew everything and had probably known longer than I had.
In the center armchair sat a man I had never seen before.
Sixties. Heavy build. A watch that probably cost more than most people’s cars. He looked up the moment I entered with the particular attention of someone who had been told to expect me specifically.
My stomach didn’t just twist. It went cold.
“Ah.” Gerald spread his arms like a man presenting something at an auction. “Here she is. Gentlemen — my stepdaughter, Seraphine Callum.”
The man in the armchair stood. Extended his hand.
“Douglas Fitch. It’s a pleasure to finally meet you.” He said it like we had history. Like my name had already been in his mouth before tonight. “Gerald speaks very highly of you.”
Finally.
That word sat in my chest like something sharp.
Finally meant conversations had already happened. Plans had been made. Decisions had been reached in rooms I was never invited into, about a future that was supposedly mine.
I shook his hand because refusing in front of eight people would start a war I wasn’t ready to finish tonight.
“Mr. Fitch.” My voice came out even. Unbothered. I’d learned a long time ago that the most powerful thing I could do in Gerald’s presence was refuse to look rattled.
His grip was too firm. Too certain. The grip of a man who had already been told yes.
Dinner was two hours of careful performance.
Douglas Fitch talked about his business the way men like him always did… as though the numbers were a personality.
He asked me questions wrapped in pleasantries. What are your plans? Do you enjoy traveling? Have you ever been to Vienna?
What he was really asking was simpler: will you be manageable?
I answered everything politely and gave him nothing real. I smiled at the right moments. I laughed when the table laughed. I watched Gerald watch me from across the table with the quiet satisfaction of a man whose plan was going exactly as expected.
When the guests finally left Margaux disappeared upstairs immediately. She always sensed storms before they arrived and she had never once chosen to stand in one beside me.
I waited in the hallway.
Gerald came out of the sitting room loosening his tie.
He looked at me. I looked at him.
“Douglas Fitch,” I said.
“A good man. Successful. Stable.”
“He’s thirty years older than me.”
“Age becomes irrelevant when…”
“You want to marry me off to a man I met two hours ago.” I kept my voice low. Steady. The quieter I got the more he listened and I needed him to hear every word.
“Without asking me. Without caring about my own feelings or decisions. Without even pretending I have a say in my own life.”
“This is a good match.” His tone was the verbal equivalent of a shrug. “You should be grateful.”
Grateful.
I let that word sit there between us for a moment. Let him hear how it sounded out loud.
“Your father’s estate requires a married trustee before full management rights can transfer,” he continued.
“You know this.”
“I know that YOU have been managing MY father’s estate for eleven years,” I said. “And I know that arrangement has been very convenient for you.”
His jaw tightened. Just slightly. “Watch your tone.”
“I’ll watch my tone when you start treating me like a person instead of a problem you’re trying to relocate.”
We stared at each other.
Gerald straightened his cuffs with the deliberate calm of a man who had never once lost control of a situation and didn’t intend to start now. “The engagement will be announced at the end of the month. I suggest you make your peace with it.”
He walked past me toward his study.
“I won’t marry him.” My voice followed him down the hallway. Quiet. Absolute.
He paused at his study door. Didn’t turn around.
“You don’t have a choice,” he said.
The door closed behind him.
I couldn’t sleep.
Two in the morning and I was sitting on the kitchen counter in the dark with cold coffee and a louder mind than I knew what to do with. The house was completely still. Even the walls felt like they were holding their breath.
You don’t have a choice.
Gerald had been saying versions of that to me since I was twelve years old. Since the day my mother came home with a new ring and a stranger’s last name on the mailbox and a look in her eyes that said she needed this even if it cost her daughter something she couldn’t yet name.
I pressed my fingers against my eyes.
There had to be a way out. There was always a way out if you were willing to look hard enough and I had never in my life stopped looking.
I slid off the counter and moved through the dark hallway toward the stairs.
That’s when I heard it.
Gerald’s study door wasn’t fully closed. A thin line of warm light cut across the hallway floor and through it came his voice — low, controlled, the voice he used when he believed no one was listening.
I stopped moving.
Stopped breathing.
“The engagement will be formal by end of month. Once the legal team processes the transfer the estate moves out of her reach entirely.” A pause. Someone on the other end of a call responding. Then Gerald again, quieter and more certain than anything I had ever heard from him.
“Once she’s married off everything her father built belongs to Vivienne. That was always the plan.”
The cold that moved through me had nothing to do with the temperature.
Everything my father built would belong to Vivienne.
I stood completely still in that dark hallway and felt something shift permanently inside my chest. This was never about finding me a husband. This was about finishing what Gerald started the day he put his name next to my mother’s… erasing David Callum’s daughter and handing everything her father built to a family that had no right to any of it.
My father’s company. His legacy. His name.
All of it.
For Vivienne.
My fingers tightened around my coffee mug.
I turned and walked silently back upstairs.
I didn’t cry.
Gerald wanted me compliant. Grateful. Defeated before I’d even started fighting.
He didn’t know me at all.