My Fiancé Chose My Dying Cousin Instead of Me

I cut my Seattle trip short by two days. I told my client the deal could close over video call. It couldn't wait, I said. That part was true, just not for the reason I gave.

Colt had been dropping hints for weeks. "Something special," he texted. "Don't make plans for Friday night." I read that text on the plane so many times the screen dimmed and I had to tap it awake again. Eight years. I thought, finally.

The rooftop was on the fortieth floor of a hotel in Midtown, all glass and string lights, white roses cascading down every railing like something out of a magazine. I stood in the doorway in my travel clothes, still smelling like airplane air, and I didn't understand what I was looking at.

Two hundred people. Colt in a navy suit. And on one knee in front of him, holding out her hand like she'd rehearsed it her whole life, was Sabrina.

My cousin. Thirteen years old the last time I really let myself love her without flinching.

Colt slid a diamond onto her finger. Cushion-cut, easily five carats, catching the string lights and throwing them back in sharp little flashes. The crowd made a sound like a held breath being let go all at once.

The champagne flute slipped out of my hand. I heard it break on the marble somewhere behind me. Nobody turned around. Nobody even looked.

I don't remember leaving. I just remember standing on the sidewalk afterward, my ears ringing, the sound of clapping still leaking out through the rooftop doors above me.

Colt showed up at my apartment the next morning like nothing had happened. He looked terrible — good terrible, the kind of terrible that's clearly been rehearsed in a mirror. He sat me down on my own couch and held both my hands like I was the one who needed comforting.

"She's sick, Allie." His voice cracked right on cue. "End-stage renal failure. The doctors say months, maybe less."

I didn't say anything. I just watched his face for the tell, the flicker, and there wasn't one. He believed every word coming out of his mouth.

"She's loved me since we were kids. I never knew. I swear I never knew." He rubbed his thumb over my knuckles like that would make it land softer. "How could I say no to a dying girl's last wish?"

A dying girl's last wish. I almost laughed. I didn't.

Then he said the thing that finally cracked something loose in my chest.

"I want you to be her maid of honor." He actually smiled when he said it, like he was offering me a gift. "She looks up to you, Allie. It would mean the world to her."

My hands started shaking. Not from grief. From something colder, something with edges.

I told him no. Flatly, quietly, the way you tell someone the store is closed.

He came back that night, soaked through from a storm that had rolled in off the river, standing outside my hotel in Midtown like he'd walked the whole way. Water dripped off his jaw. He looked pathetic and he knew it, and some old, worn-down part of me still almost opened the door wider than I meant to.

"Just talk to her," he said. "Convince her to do the surgery. It's risky, but if she does it — Allie, once she's taken care of, I'll marry you. Tomorrow. City Hall, just us. I promise."

He said it like a business deal. Like I was supposed to feel lucky.

I thought about the soda can tab I still wore on a chain under my shirt, and the five-carat ring flashing under string lights, and I felt something rise up hot and sour in my throat.

I shut the door in his face. Didn't say a word.

Alone in my room, I didn't cry. I sat on the edge of the bed for a long minute, staring at nothing. Then I opened my laptop.

Blank document. Cursor blinking.

I thought about Marco Mendez — CEO of Mendez Capital, the one name that made Colt's board members go quiet in meetings. We'd met once, briefly, at an industry dinner two years back. He'd asked good questions and remembered my answers. I found the mutual contact who could get a message to him and typed out a short, careful note about a possible role at his London office. Then I closed the laptop and called Kalani.

"I need everything on Sabrina," I said. "Every text, every message, all of it."

There was a pause, but not a surprised one.

"I've been waiting for you to say that," Kalani said.