A Beaumont Royale key card.

A receipt.

And a folded handwritten note addressed to Daniel.

A note I had never written.

My mother saw its corner protruding from the fallen dress.

Her face collapsed.

Lila stopped breathing.

Daniel noticed their reaction.

“What is that?”

I bent toward the gown.

My mother rushed forward.

“Don’t touch it!”

I stopped with my fingers inches from the pocket.

Daniel stared at her.

“Why?”

She had no answer.

I slowly pulled the folded paper free.

Lila began shaking her head.

“Please…”

Daniel stepped beside me.

“Who wrote that?”

The chandeliers reflected across the folded paper.

Every phone in the ballroom pointed toward us.

My mother suddenly lunged across the aisle.

I raised the note beyond her reach.

Daniel caught her arm.

And as I began unfolding the message she had hidden inside the dress meant to humiliate me—

my mother screamed.

“DON’T READ THAT!”

Silence swallowed the room.

Even the cameras seemed to stop moving.

I unfolded the paper.

The handwriting was unmistakable.

My mother’s.

Daniel’s face changed before I read a single word.

And suddenly I knew that whatever I was holding was bigger than a wedding dress.

I lifted the microphone.

Then I read.

“Daniel—

Keep her emotional until the ceremony is finished. She gets stubborn when she thinks she is in control, but she becomes careless when she’s angry.

The documents will be waiting in Suite 1814.

Tell her they concern the marriage trust.

Once she signs the proxy, the voting authority becomes yours for five years.

Your remaining payment will be transferred after the paperwork is filed.

Lila receives what we agreed.

I regain control of Meridian.

And Claire never has to know that you met me six months before you met her.

Destroy this.

—V.”

For several seconds, nobody breathed.

I heard the blood pounding behind my ears.

Then I turned toward the man I had been prepared to marry.

Daniel had gone gray.

Not pale.

Gray.

“What does that mean?”

He said nothing.

I took a step toward him.

“Daniel.”

“Claire…”

“Were you paid to meet me?”

My mother’s voice cut through the ballroom.

“This is not the place.”

I swung toward her.

“Then tell me the place, Mom. Because apparently you already rented a room for the rest of my humiliation.”

“Lower your voice.”

That nearly broke something inside me.

Thirty-four years old.

Founder and majority shareholder of a company valued at nearly forty million dollars.

Employer of more than a hundred people.

Owner of my own home.

And standing before three hundred witnesses, my mother still spoke to me as if I were a child throwing a tantrum in a grocery store.

“No.”

I stepped toward her.

“You don’t get to tell me how loudly I react to discovering that my fiancé may have been hired to marry me.”

That sentence rippled through the ballroom.

Daniel closed his eyes.

My stomach dropped.

Because innocent men protested.

Innocent men shouted.

Innocent men demanded explanations.

Daniel did none of those things.

He whispered, “It wasn’t supposed to happen this way.”

My knees almost failed.

I gripped the microphone harder.

“Was any of it real?”

He looked at me.