Page 4 of The Spare

He shrugs. ‘You’ve got me. This is all self-serving, but I mean it. We should both have told our parents to fuck off years ago.’

‘Well, we didn’t,’ I remind him, ‘and meanwhile, the wedding that Tatler called “the wedding of the decade” is supposed to be happening next week, and you may as well have jilted me at the fucking altar for all the good this little visit is doing, because I am going to be humiliated.’

Oh my God, the humiliation. I’ve lived and breathed this union, this wedding, for so long. I played dress-up with Tatler in a sumptuous festive shoot with Xavier, and I’m not ashamed to say I loved every minute of it. There I was, wearing couture and standing in Belvedere bedecked with Wentworth Home merch, feeling as though I was standing in the warm golden spotlight of my future.

The Future Duke and Duchess of Oxford, so the headline went.

The mortification will be total. It will be merciless. All those women who’ve hated me for so many years—there are so many of them. So many sour grapes among our social set. And they’ll fucking pelt me with them, make no mistake. Shame is torching my skin, squeezing my stomach, paralysing my lungs. The horror of it feels exactly like being stripped naked and dragged to the stocks in the middle of a medieval town square.

It’s all over. I am my accomplishments; I am my persona, and he’s taking every last bit of it from me. I will always be the woman who waited her entire life for Xavier de Vere to walk her down the aisle, only to be cast aside for a nobody who could easily pass for that unhinged daughter from Yellowstone.

‘I know,’ he says, ‘and I’m willing to do whatever it takes to help out. I can make a statement, if you like, though an explanation might be more damaging. We can say it was your decision, maybe? Though⁠—’

He is driving me nuts. I can’t think straight. This full-on panic is hijacking not only my body but my brain, which I’m pretty sure thinks I’m dying. I hold out a hand to stop him. ‘For God’s sake, shut up and let me think for a minute. Jesus.’

I register his look of shock, the slack way his mouth drops open, and a small part of me, the part that’s not spinning out in epic style, is amused. He’s never seen me like this. I’ve never let the mask drop, never been anything other than the perfect, pliant, polished fiancée.

And look where that got me.

I can’t stand still. There’s too much nervous energy coursing through my body: fury, and righteous outrage, and all that shame, and the reflexive need to fix, to plan, to act—to fucking do something about all this mess rather than stand here like a total muppet and just take it. I begin to pace, feeling Xavier’s eyes on me as if I’m some sort of loose cannon. An unknowable entity.

‘I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t,’ I say, mainly to myself. As soon as the words leave my mouth, I know they’re true. ‘If we don’t say anything, everyone will know you dumped me. If we say I finished it, I’ll be the entitled little bitch who doesn’t know when she’s onto a good thing. There’s literally no good way to handle it.’

My fertile imagination, a blessing when I’m in creative mode at work and the worst kind of curse right now, serves up the most egregious of tabloid headlines.

JILTED.

A DUCAL DUMPING.

THE LADY OR THE TRAMP?

Fuuuuck.

I glare at him, as if challenging him to contradict me, and he makes a face. ‘Do you care what the public thinks, though?’

Of all the ignorant things to say. What the public thinks is quite literally the only thing I care about. It’s the only thing I’ve ever cared about. Does he know me at all?

Now I really do let rip at him.

‘Of course I care what the public thinks!’ I scream. ‘We have a brand to run. Perception is reality. And your walking away right at the last minute, after you’ve had your whole fucking life to pull your fucking finger out, is the worst thing you could possibly do to me. It’s a million times worse than our never having been together in the first place. No, a billion. I’ve made this wedding my entire personality. I even played dress-up at Belvedere for bloody Tatler—which I knew was tempting fate, by the way, and I still went ahead and did it—and now I’m going to be a total laughingstock. The press will have a field day.’

Even as I spew the words out, I know I’m on my own here. Xavier doesn’t give a shit, not really. How can he, if he’s prepared to walk away from his title, his inheritance, his entire birthright? He wouldn’t share it with me, so he’s burnt it all to hell. And he doesn’t even care, because he’s planning on waltzing off into the sunset with her. If I want to emerge from this public relations disaster with any vestige of my reputation intact, clearly I’ll have to manage the whole thing by myself.

A tear slides free from my eye, and I wipe it away furiously. Shit. I hate that he’s seeing me like this: undone, and vulnerable, and off-kilter.

When he speaks, his voice is gentle. ‘I can understand how distressing calling off the wedding will be for you and your parents, and I’m not trying to understate that.’ He shifts awkwardly, stuffing his hands into his pockets. ‘But a wedding and a marriage are two very different things, and I honestly don’t think either of us would have been happy long term, for what it’s worth.’

He seems to be undergoing some kind of major lobotomy. We’ve always known the deal, he and I, even if we haven’t discussed it at length. It’s not the kind of thing you discuss, but neither of us is stupid. This union was never going to be some great love story, but it was going to be a major fucking triumph on all fronts, and I disagree with him.

We would have made each other happy.

My old house mistress can go to hell. I’ve always known what I want, and I’ve always wanted this. I did everything right. I played by every rule in the book. I wrote the bloody book. I even went off to school at Le Rosey in Geneva for a proper ‘finish’ when all my friends went to Hartwell House nearby. I have never, not once, taken my eye off the prize.

And now, not only is he snatching that prize away, telling me that none of it was good enough, but he’s daring to gaslight me, to mansplain what I do and don’t want for my future.

Happiness. Seriously? That’s what he thinks life is about?

If I’d wanted to be happy, I would have followed my actual heart and let his dastardly brother shag me. Except I wouldn’t, because being fucked and then fucked over by Benedict de Vere is categorically not the path to happiness if you want the feeling to last for more than one night.