My name is Lila Carter, and I am twenty-four years old. In the circles my mother desperately tried to keep us in, twenty-four is the age where potential begins to curdle into spinsterhood, at least according to the archaic rules of high-society Seattle.
My mother, Eleanor, has always been a woman of cold, practical logic. She treats emotions like unnecessary overhead costs in the business of living. She is a woman who irons her sheets and counts her calories, and she views love as a chaotic variable that ruins perfectly good equations.
I remember sitting at our kitchen table, the varnish peeling slightly at the edges—a subtle sign of our fading fortune. The Seattle rain was drumming a relentless, gray rhythm against the windowpane, blurring the city lights into streaks of watercolor.
My mother set her tea cup down. It made a sharp clink against the saucer.
“A girl who marries a poor man is signing up for a lifetime of misery, Lila,” she said, her eyes scanning a stack of overdue notices as if they were merely interesting literature. “You don’t have to love him. Romance is for novels. You just have to make sure he can give you a stable life. A roof that doesn’t leak. A future that doesn’t involve checking the bank balance before buying milk.”
I used to think this was just her way of hardening me against the world. I thought she was trying to protect me from the kind of heartbreak she endured when my father died, leaving us with a mountain of debt and a crumbling reputation.
I was wrong. She wasn’t warning me. She was preparing me for a sale.
The day the foreclosure notice turned from a threat into a reality—a bright pink paper pasted to our front door like a mark of shame—my mother revealed her plan.
“There is a way out,” she said, her voice trembling for the first time in years.
That was the day she told me about Ethan Blackwell.
The Broken Prince of Seattle
The Blackwell name is woven into the infrastructure of Washington state. They own the shipping docks, the tech firms, the skyline itself. Ethan was the only son, the heir to a kingdom of concrete and glass.
But five years ago, the narrative of the Golden Boy shattered. A car crash on a slick highway took his ability to walk—or so the headlines screamed. The gossip columns were cruel. They painted him as a recluse, a bitter man who had retreated into the shadows of his family’s massive estate, rejecting society before it could reject him.
People whispered that he had become cold. That he hated women. That his heart had atrophied along with his legs.
“Lila, listen to me,” my mother pleaded, gripping my hands across the table. Her skin was ice cold. “If you marry Ethan, the Blackwell estate will forgive your father’s business debt. They will buy the house. We will be safe. Otherwise… we are on the street by Tuesday.”
I looked at her, really looked at her, and saw the terror behind her makeup.
“Mom, you’re asking me to marry a stranger. A man who supposedly hates the world.”
“I’m begging you,” she whispered, tears finally spilling over. “Please, honey. It’s a merger. It’s business. But it saves us.”
I bit my lip until I tasted iron. I looked at the rain battering the window, threatening to flood us.
“Okay,” I whispered. “I’ll do it.”
A Wedding of Ghosts:
