The Billionaire Forced His Son to Marry a Village Girl — But Her Hidden Secret Left Everyone at the Wedding Speechless.

Chapter 3

Daniel did not go to the stall. He told himself he was too busy. He told himself it would be awkward. He told himself there was no point in going before the wedding since whatever conversation they needed to have could happen in a more appropriate setting.

What he did not tell himself, because he was not yet the kind of man who examined his own evasions, was that he was afraid.

Not physically afraid. But afraid in the way you are afraid of things that might complicate a life you have arranged to be uncomplicated. Afraid that if he went to the stall and looked at her for himself, he would be required to update something in his understanding of the situation, and updating something in his understanding of the situation felt like an enormous amount of effort for a thing that had been decided by someone else.

So he did not go.

He spent the month doing the things he normally did. He attended meetings. He had dinners. He appeared at two events that he had already committed to before the announcement. At each of these, people asked him about the wedding, and he said as little as possible, and the saying of as little as possible was interpreted by some as mystery and by others as embarrassment and by others as evidence of the gold-digger theory, and none of these interpretations were correct.

The correct interpretation was that Daniel Harrington was not sure how he felt about any of it, and did not yet know what he would find when he looked directly at the thing he had been avoiding looking at.

The wedding was held at the Harrington Estate.

His father had chosen the venue himself, which was unusual — he normally delegated event planning to professionals and simply approved their choices. His involvement in the details this time was something Daniel noted and filed away, another thing to examine later.

Three hundred guests. Cream and gold for the decorations. A string quartet for the ceremony and a full band for the reception. The catering was done by a company that had handled three state dinners in the last decade. Everything about it communicated, as everything about the Harrington family communicated, a particular kind of weight.

The guests who arrived were precisely the guests Daniel had always known at these events. The family friends. The business associates. The people whose names required no introduction because their names were themselves introductions. They moved through the room with the comfortable ease of people on familiar terrain, and they talked about Grace the way people talk about things they have already decided the meaning of.

Daniel was standing with his groomsmen when she arrived.

He had not seen her before this moment. He realized, with a slight shock, that he had gone the entire month without seeing her — had seen only the photograph on his father’s desk, reproduced across a thousand comment sections, and then replicated in his own mind in ways that had grown increasingly distorted the more he tried not to think about it.

She came through the side entrance, not the main doors, which he would learn later was because she had not wanted to perform an entrance. She was with her maid of honor, a childhood friend named Amara who would prove, over the course of the afternoon, to be someone entirely unimpressed by the scale of the event or the weight of the names attached to it.