The Wedding Was A Game And Her Father Was The Prize Chapter 03
After I left, someone dropped a video from the party into the group chat.
Bianca was clearly drunk in it, cheeks flushed pink.
“Nolan Ashford, you’ve lost three rounds in a row now. You have to be my husband for a whole month!”
Nolan gave a helpless laugh and nodded, agreeing.
The rest of them started chanting.
“Kiss! Kiss! Kiss!”
The video cut off there.
I spent the entire night being resuscitated in the ER.
Morning.
At my bedside, Dad was gripping my hand hard, his unseeing eyes rimmed red from staying up.
“Claire, you scared Dad to death… The doctor said ten more minutes and you wouldn’t have made it.”
I didn’t say a word about the truth of the night before.
I only told him I’d eaten something bad and it triggered an allergic reaction.
Nolan hadn’t called once the entire night.
He’d sent two flat, hollow voice memos in the early hours of the morning.
【Claire, did you end up in the ER?】
【Don’t be mad anymore. I’ll come by first thing tomorrow to check on you and Dad.】
Dad heard the voice memo notifications and his face brightened at once.
“Nolan’s coming to see you? Are you two making up?”
“He’s a good boy. When I brought him down from that mountain, he got on his knees and swore to me he’d take care of you.”
Yes. Nolan had made that promise, right in front of my father.
That he would take care of me.
But for five years, he had let Bianca use me as her toy at the gaming table over and over.
Dad reached for his white cane and insisted on going downstairs to wait.
Nothing I said would stop him.
Two hours passed.
I stood at the hospital-room window and looked down at Boston’s cold morning wind, and at Dad’s hunched figure, standing on his white cane, waiting.
Nolan didn’t come.
Bianca, however, had posted a new Instagram Story.
In the photo, Nolan was sitting at her family’s dining table, sipping coffee with her parents, all of them laughing.
The caption read.
【My dad said he missed Nolan. He dropped everything and came right over. 🥰】
Looking down at that hunched silhouette on the sidewalk, my nose stung.
Nolan didn’t finally arrive until the afternoon.
Bianca was trailing right behind him.
“Mr. Sutton, Nolan brought me to come see you.”
She smiled and pressed two ivory-colored official folders into Dad’s hands together.
“This is our marriage certificate. Feel the cover.”
Dad’s rough fingertips traced the embossed gold lettering, and his eyes filled instantly.
“Good… good… Claire finally got to marry Nolan…”
He couldn’t see.
He thought it was my marriage certificate and Nolan’s.
But I could see it perfectly clearly.
Inside the folder were the names Nolan Ashford and Bianca Whitmore.
Date of registration: this morning.
Nolan caught the look on my face and grabbed my wrist, dragging me out into the hallway.
“Claire, don’t spiral on me.”
“I only went to City Hall with Bianca because I lost the bet. Her parents have been pushing her to get married, and I was just going along with it to make them happy.”
“We’ll be divorced in a month. Then you and I can go get our own license, okay?”
He treated marriage like a party game.
And he treated me like a fool.
I looked at him and, all of a sudden, I didn’t even have the energy to be angry anymore.
“Nolan, we’re done.”
He blinked, brows pulling together.
“Claire Sutton, we already had the wedding. This is just paperwork.”
“Can you please not blow every little thing up like this?”
The door to the hospital room opened.
Bianca leaned out, pouting.
“Nolan honey, we still have to go pick up honeymoon stuff. The stores will close if we’re any later.”
Nolan called back over his shoulder.
Bianca smiled and looped her arm through his, and the two of them disappeared down the corridor.
I walked back into the room, ready to make up some excuse.
But I found tears streaming from Dad’s lightless eyes.
“Claire, don’t hide it from Dad anymore… I heard everything.”
“Leave him. We’re not putting up with this.”
I fought down the burning in my throat and nodded, hard.
That night, Nolan sent me a message.
【Nine a.m. flight tomorrow, headed for Aspen.】
【Come on your own. And stop with the theatrics.】
I didn’t reply.
I opened the airline’s website and booked two one-way tickets overseas.
Boston to Munich.
Lufthansa Flight 423.
Departure: eight a.m. the next morning.