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I fumble for my phone and answer the video call.
“Hi!” Okay, that was way too enthusiastic. They’ll know something is up.
But then I grin. Something is up.
“Uh, hi,” Charlie says. “We’re calling for our sister Abigail? She looks a little like you. Is she there somewhere?”
“Ha, ha,” I say, sinking down onto the bed.
My butt just touching that mattress makes me blush too.
“What’s going on? You said you needed to talk and we had to be together,” Ami says. Then she yawns.
I grin. “How’s Rosie?”
“The light of my life.” She yawns again. “And my nights. And my three a.m.s.” She shakes her head. “We’re not talking about my baby or how I may never sleep through the night again. We want to know about you.”
“Okay, well, I just thought I should tell you…” I take a breath. “I’m getting married.” I hold up my left hand to show off the ring.
The absolutely gorgeous ring that Torin slipped on my finger last night…while denying me sex. But I immediately focus on my sisters as they both gasp, then scream.
I wince. And give them a minute.
“Oh my God!”
“Abigail!”
“What?”
“Is it Torin?”
“What happened?”
“What is going on?”
“When?”
“Oh! My! God!”
When they both stop babbling, I fill them in. On all of it. How he and Linnea were never really engaged. Why he has to marry someone. What our goals are. When we’re doing it. And then I re-emphasize that it’s just a temporary arrangement to meet two very specific goals.
They both sit blinking at me.
“Did you get all of that?” I ask.
“What I got was that we don’t get to come to your wedding,” Ami says.
“Because it’s not a wedding wedding. And if you come, everyone else will find out about it and that’s unnecessarily complicated.”
“But…” Charlie says, frowning. “You like him. And you’re attracted to him. And he built you a farm. He’s basically giving you your dream job! Why wouldn’t you want to stay married? I mean, you could fall in love with him!”
I’m shaking my head by the time she finishes. I can not fall in love with Torin. That would be a really terrible thing to do. “I have to be a…pri…princess as it is,” I say with an eyeroll. That word really is hard for me to say. But I’ll be anti-social and probably not well-liked or popular and I’m used to that, and it will make it a lot easier on the people of Cara when I leave. “If we stay married, I’d have to be the queen.” I give a humorless laugh. My chest feels tight as I think about it. “I would be so, so bad at that. You know that.”
“Abi,” Charlie says gently. “It won’t be easy, probably, but you can do hard things.”
I stare at the carpet.
Can I?
