My mother was a woman of iron logic and cold ambition. She always said, “A girl who marries a poor man marries a lifetime of suffering. You don’t need love, Lila — you need security.”
I thought she was exaggerating. Until the day she came to me in tears, begging.
Ethan Blackwell — the only son of one of Seattle’s wealthiest families. Handsome, educated, and confined to a wheelchair after a terrible accident five years earlier. The tabloids said he was reclusive, bitter, and cold.
I said yes out of duty, not love.
The wedding was grand — white roses, chandeliers, a sea of strangers. Everyone called it a fairytale, but I felt like a prop in someone else’s story. Ethan barely spoke through the ceremony, his expression unreadable, his eyes distant.
The Wedding Night
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