Page 28 of Broken Vows

I cup my hand to block out the mid-morning sun and glance out the window at the surrounding buildings. “But sadly, I’m going to miss the breakfast of champions because I’m already in the office.”

“Damn, already? It’s not even seven yet.”

“I know.” The traffic is just starting to pick up below. The slow churn of taxis, buses, and pedestrians fills the street. As the neighborhood springs to life, I scan each face on the sidewalk. “I wanted to get ahead on some paperwork before the clinic opened.”

“Jesus Christ, you work too much,” she says.

“Honestly, it’s not that bad.” I lift the mug of subpar coffee to my lips. “You should’ve seen me during med school.”

“I did see you. You were an asshole.”

I laugh. She’s not wrong—medical school hours are brutal. The weight of it nearly broke me. One would think growing up an Astor would’ve prepared me for that kind of pressure, and in some ways it did. Being the best, the golden child as my family painted me, the one my dad paraded in front of his colleagues with a slap on the back and a half-assed remark about following in his footsteps, came with suffocating expectations. The hours I worked back then is what drove my need for control. They were what filled the void after my passion—my addiction, the one thing that quieted my mind—was gone.

“Thank you, seriously,” Anna says. “You have no idea how much I appreciate this.”

What she isn’t saying is that the wedding—and all the attention around it—makes her uncomfortable. We’ve known each other since elementary school. I know her better than anyone. Yes, she’s a Barlowe, but out of her entire family, Anna’s the one who stays furthest under the radar, skipping public events and donating anonymously. Even as a teenager, she refused to be in family holiday photos. She always joked she was like Sharon and Ozzy’s eldest daughter, the one everyone forgets exists. So, her detachment from the wedding planning doesn’t shock me.

“Oh! Also, our families reached a guest count,” she says. “Can I get a drum roll please…”

My back tenses. “I’m scared to ask.”

“Six hundred.”

“Are you kidding?” I don’t know why I’m surprised—our families thrive on adoration. I’m shocked it’s not in the thousands. Still, six hundred is absurd. No one has that many friends. The wedding is becoming exactly what Anna and I feared: a semi-formal networking event.

When Lexie described her ideal wedding—just her, the groom, and the lake as their witness—my stomach twisted. Once I pushed past that, it sounded perfect. Intimate. Serene. It wouldn’t be a show for six hundred goddamn people like our parents want.

“I know…” she says, then pauses. “Are we moving too fast? Maybe we should rethink—”

“We can’t.” There’s too much riding on this wedding—too many interests at stake. But her silence tightens something in my chest. The sigh that follows tells me everything.

Did Lexie say something to her last week at the hotel? They claimed they were just talking about family but what if there was more to it? I haven’t forgotten the forced smiles, the way Lexie steered the conversation the moment I returned. I knew I shouldn’t have let that woman out of my sight. Because if Lexie planted even a single seed of doubt…

Annabelle cannot back out of the wedding.

I scratch the back of my neck and push out a burning exhale. “Talk to me. Are you good?”

“Yeah. I just… I wish it could be different.”

My jaw flexes. “I know. Me too.”

And we leave it like that. Fifteen years’ of unspoken words, of conversations we refuse to have, of familial pressure we continue to endure. But we know how it is. I’m an Astor and she’s a Barlowe and we can’t fight the rules we were born into.

“Have you decided about Sunday?” she asks.

“No idea what you’re talking about.” I roll the chair up to the window and blink against the rising sun beams.

“Theo.” Annabelle’s voice turns stern, which is honestly kind of cute. She’s like a kitten pretending to be a lion, and sometimes that’s my favorite version of her. “You need to talk to your mother. If all of… this… is going to work, you need at least one conversation.”

Anna doesn’t elaborate on what “this” means, but I know. The wedding. The joining of two families, old-school Godfather-style. The Astor family with the shipping heiress mother and brilliant sociopathic father merging with the Barlowes of hedge fund and investment empires to create one super-family.

Our families have been unusually hands-off so far, which surprises us both—but that restraint won’t last. They’ll want reassurance soon. Proof that the Astors and the Barlowes will finally be bound in marriage without any further delay.

“Theo,” she repeats, with an even sharper edge to her tone. “You can’t ignore her forever.”

I run my hands along my jaw. “Can’t I?”

As far as I’m concerned, my mother’s complicit in my father’s behavior. She knows. She has to. She’s too smart, too powerful not to see what he does—and she lets him do it anyway. The rest of the family follows her lead, pretending he isn’t a narcissistic monster, giving him the freedom to carry on untouched.