Isabella's POV
The salon door clicks shut behind us, and I realize the entire street-level floor has been emptied — every chair, every stylist, every client — just for this two-hour window before my life gets repackaged for public consumption.
"You closed a working salon," I say, not quite a question.
"It's my building." Alexander doesn't look up from his phone. "Sit."
I don't sit. I stand in the middle of the marble floor still in Sophie's t-shirt and stare at the three stylists arranging tools in silence, the way people move when they've been told exactly what to do and paid very well to do it without conversation.
"I'm not a project," I say.
Alexander pockets his phone then, finally, and turns to look at me with that particular stillness I'm already starting to recognize — the kind that means he's decided something and is waiting for me to catch up. "No," he says. "You're my fiancée. There's a difference."
Before I can answer, the salon's back door opens and a woman in a structured black jacket rolls in a rack of dresses, followed by two assistants carrying garment bags. The rack is full — every color, every silhouette, each piece clearly selected rather than thrown together.
"This is unnecessary," I start.
"Choose something," Alexander says, already moving away. "You have ninety minutes."
"I'm not letting you dress me."
He stops walking and turns back, just his eyes finding mine across the room. "You walk into a press conference in that" — he gestures briefly at the t-shirt — "and every camera in that room will run the story your father is already writing about you. The broke, discarded daughter who couldn't hold her own fiancé." He lets that land. "Or you walk in looking like what you actually are. Your choice."
I look at the rack. Then back at him. "What I actually am," I repeat.
"Mine." He says it simply, without drama, the way someone states a fact they've had a long time to get used to. "And mine doesn't walk into a room looking like she needs saving."
I cross to the rack and start moving through it, and I don't look at him again.
* * *
The stylist's name is Vera, and she works the way my best professors did — without explaining herself, focused and exact, her hands moving through my hair with the efficiency of someone who has already decided what the outcome is going to be and is simply executing it.
"He's never come to a session before," Vera says, half to herself, pinning a section back. "Not once. He usually just sends the card."
"Does he do this often?" I ask. "The whole — transformation package?"
Vera's eyes meet mine in the mirror, and she gives exactly the answer her employment contract probably requires. "Mr. Whitmore has excellent taste."
Across the salon, Alexander is on a call, standing at the window with his back to the room, and I watch him the way you watch something you haven't decided whether to trust yet. He's controlled — I've already established that. But "controlled" is different from cold. He paces two steps, stops, paces back, and I notice the way his free hand closes briefly into a fist when something on the call displeases him — contained but real, a seam of actual feeling running under all that discipline.
He hangs up and turns, and catches me watching him, and doesn't look away.
I turn back to the mirror.
"Better," he says, appearing behind me, studying the half-finished result with the focused attention of a man who notices things. "Leave the length. Take the wave out at the end."
Vera nods without comment.
"I wasn't asking for your input," I say.
"I know." He meets my eyes in the mirror, and there's something there that might, in another life, have been amusement. "You'll thank me when every camera in that room is trying to find the angle that makes you look broken."
"Will they find it?"
"Not today." He holds my gaze one beat longer than necessary, then walks back to the window.
* * *
Sophie arrives forty minutes in, ushered through by the assistant who apparently had her address and a car waiting before I even walked out of the lobby. She stops in the salon doorway, takes in the scene — the rack of clothes, the three silent stylists, the man at the window — and then looks at me in the chair and says nothing for a full five seconds.
"Okay," Sophie finally manages.
"Don't," I say.
"I wasn't going to say anything."
"You were going to say I look different."
"You look incredible," she says, and then immediately glances at Alexander like she's not sure whether she's allowed to say that out loud in his presence.
He doesn't react. He's reading something on his tablet, one shoulder against the wall, and if he hears her, he gives no sign.
Sophie drops into the chair beside me and lowers her voice. "Is this — are you okay? Like actually okay, not the face you make when you're holding everything together with one hand?"
"I'm fine."
"That was the face."
I exhale. "He's not what I expected. That's all."
Sophie glances toward the window again. "What did you expect?"
"Someone using the contract to collect something he's owed," I say quietly. "Not someone who remembers a funeral from seventeen years ago."
Sophie goes still. "What?"
"The handkerchief," I say, and leave it there, because Vera is close and some things don't have short explanations.
Sophie stares at me. Then she stares at Alexander. Then she stares at the emerald dress hanging at the end of the rack — the one I've been deliberately not looking at for the last twenty minutes.
"That's your dress, isn't it," she says.
"It's a dress."
"Isabella."
"It's a dress chosen by someone who apparently researched me well enough to know my exact size and the fact that I look terrible in yellow." I keep my voice level. "Which is either impressive or unsettling, and I haven't decided which."
"Both," Sophie says. "Definitely both."
* * *
The emerald is silk, cut clean and sharp without anything soft or apologetic about it, and when I step out of the changing room the three stylists stop what they're doing entirely. Vera puts down her brush.
Alexander looks up from his tablet.
He doesn't say anything for a moment. His eyes move over me once, with the systematic attention of someone doing an actual assessment rather than performing admiration, and then something in his jaw shifts.
"There," he says, quiet and certain. "That's the woman they're going to see."
"I'm the same person I was twenty minutes ago."
"I know." He crosses the room and stops in front of me, producing a small velvet box from his jacket pocket — not the ring, which is already on my finger, but a pair of earrings. Simple gold drops, exactly what I would have chosen myself. "The difference is they're going to believe it now."
I take the box without arguing.
One of his assistants appears at his shoulder with a thin folder, and Alexander holds it out to me. "Your answers are in here. The narrative is standard — childhood connection, families joined since birth, a love that outlasted everything. You don't need to memorize it word for word. Just understand the shape of it."
I open the folder and read. My eyes move down the page quickly, and I pause at one particular line.
"It says I chose to end my engagement with Ethan," I say. "Not that I walked out of my own wedding because my fiancé planned to marry my stepsister."
"That story comes later," Alexander says. "Today we give them the bigger story first. Tomorrow they'll be hungry for the rest."
I look up at him. "You've thought about this in stages."
"I've thought about a lot of things in stages." He holds my eyes. "Do you trust the shape of it?"
I actually consider that — not as a performance of deliberation but as a real question about a real decision. Then I close the folder.
"I trust that you want this to work," I say. "I'll decide about the rest later."
His expression doesn't change, but something behind his eyes does, and I have the distinct impression I've said something that matters to him without knowing exactly what.
"Good enough," he says.
* * *
The car is quiet as it moves through midtown, Sophie having been redirected to a separate vehicle with the particular efficiency of a man who wants no witnesses to whatever happens in the next ten minutes. I sit across from Alexander with the folder on my knees and watch the city slide past the window.
His hand settles on my thigh. Not a tentative gesture — deliberate, warm, a weight I feel through the silk of the dress. I don't move.
"They'll be looking for cracks," he says. "At the beginning, when they call your names. When they ask how long. That's when people reveal themselves — the first few seconds before the performance locks in."
"Then don't perform," I say.
He glances at me.
"I mean it." I turn from the window to look at him. "If you stand up there and perform warmth, they'll see exactly what it is. So don't. Just — be whatever you actually are when you're standing next to me."
A pause. His eyes search my face, and I have the strange sensation of being read carefully by someone who is very good at it and does it rarely by accident.
"And what am I when I'm standing next to you?" he asks.
"I don't know yet," I say. "But it's more real than anything I've seen you do in the last two hours, which means the cameras will think so too."
Something happens in his expression. The control is still there, always there, but underneath it there's a shift I can feel more than see.
"We've been in love since we were children," he says, quiet and deliberate. "The contract was our parents' blessing. You're finally mine after years of waiting." His hand presses slightly firmer against my thigh. "Can you sell that?"
I think of Ethan at the altar in my chapel, my flowers in Vanessa's hands, my cake, my willow trees, my six years converted into someone else's romantic moment. I think of my father saying don't be selfish, Isabella like that was the whole of who I was supposed to be. I think of the news cameras and three hundred guests and a chyron that called me jealous.
My smile comes up slow and sharp, the kind that doesn't reach my eyes in the way smiles are supposed to but does something colder and more interesting instead.
"Watch me," I say.