Page 94 of All These Beautiful Strangers

“Margot,” I said softly. Shit, this was going to be harder than I’d thought. “There’s not going to be a wedding,” I said.

She looked up at me. I had her attention now.

“What do you mean there’s not going to be a wedding?” she asked.

“I’m not telling you about me and Grace because it’s over,” I said. “I’m telling you, because, well, the wedding’s off.”

“I don’t understand,” Margot said.

“Grace and I, we got married this past weekend,” I said. “I wasn’t golfing all weekend with my father like I told you. I was with Grace.”

Margot didn’t say anything. She stared down at her mug of tea.

I was quiet for a moment. I didn’t know what to say, sitting there with Margot amid all the reminders of our upcoming nuptials.

Margot bit her lip and subconsciously fingered the band of her engagement ring like she often did when she was deep in thought. My eye caught on my grandmother’s canary diamond on her finger. That was going to be the other difficult part about all of this. I knew it was the gentlemanly thing to let the jilted fiancée keep the ring in the event the groom called off the wedding. But the ring was a family heirloom.

“You don’t need to worry about anything,” I said after a while. “I’ll take care of the cancellations—the venues, the guests, all of it. You don’t need to do anything.”

“That’s noble of you,” Margot said dryly.

“But,” I said. Christ, this was hard. “Well, there is one thing.”

“What?” Margot asked. “What could you possibly want from me?”

I let out my breath slowly.

“I need my grandmother’s ring back,” I said.

What made this a hundred times worse was that the broken engagement would change Margot’s financial prospects drastically. It would have made me feel the tiniest bit better if, at the very least, I could have left her with something that would ease that burden.

“I could get it appraised,” I said. “I can give you whatever the value is.”

Margot scoffed. “I don’t need your handouts, Alistair,” she said, prideful. She twisted the ring off her finger and set it on the table between us. “You and I, it was never about the money.”

I let the ring and that lie sit there between us, and I felt the weight of both. Margot and I had never been about the money exactly. I knew it had been more than that. It had been about my family, the Calloway name, which I wore like a brand. It had been about our shared ambitions and what we could accomplish together. But the money was always a part of it.

Margot had always wanted to be a surgeon, an expensive and arduous career choice in itself, but she didn’t plan to stop there. Margot dreamed of opening a center for surgical discovery and research—a facility dedicated to developing and testing new surgical tools and techniques, a place that would bring surgeons, engineers, and innovators together. But a research center like that didn’t happen without a large financial backer, and without a name like mine behind it.

We sat there in silence for a while. There was no crying, no tears, no tantrums, no throwing of hard objects, no vague, irrational threats. But this was Margot—cold, analytical Margot. Of course my life-altering declaration was met with a steely calm.

“Why her?” Margot asked. She had that look on her face, like she was trying to figure out some complicated algorithm. “Why her and not me?”

“Margot—”

“No, I just want to understand,” Margot said. She ran her finger around the edge of her mug. “She’s pretty, sure, but marrying someone for their looks is a poor investment. So it’s got to be something else . . . but what, exactly?”

I sighed. I picked at my loose thumbnail.

“She’s working-class,” Margot went on. “She’s poorly educated, she doesn’t have an ambitious bone in her body, and she’s soft. By every calculation, she’s a poor match for you.”

I knew Margot was wrong; Grace was so much more than that. But sitting there and extolling Grace’s virtues wouldn’t help matters.

“You can’t always rationalize these things,” I said. “You love who you love.”

When I looked up at Margot, she had that look of deep disappointment on her face, one I had seen there once before. It was something like disgust mixed with pity, and I couldn’t help but look away. I had that feeling in the pit of my stomach—a deep, burning, gut-twisting sense of shame.

“Love,” Margot said. “You’re throwing away what we could have had for love?”