My Mother Asked Who I Wanted To Marry. This Time, I Didn’t Choose Simon Hughes…

 

Part I: The Answer That Split the Room

My mother asked who I wanted to marry, expecting a name she’d memorized like a prayer. I didn’t give it to her.

“Daniel Hughes,” I said. Not Simon. Never again.

Her gaze sharpened until the air felt cut. “Daniel,” she repeated, as if the syllables might rearrange into sense if she said them slowly enough. “His uncle.”

The Hughes family name could split a city block into attention. Their money had poured the foundations of half the towers that carved the Los Angeles skyline. For ten years, I’d chased the heir the city expected me to choose, and did choose the first time around. In that life—the one that ended with me finding a locked room lined with photos of my cousin—I had returned vows with a man who never touched me and pretended it was a private problem we were brave not to name. I called it dignity. It was starvation.

On our golden wedding anniversary, I found the truth. A hidden door. Silver frames. Audrey’s face on every surface like an altar he’d been worshiping since the day we said yes. It wasn’t that Simon couldn’t love. He simply didn’t love me.

Then I died. Or something ended so completely it may as well have been death, because when I woke to this second life, I recognized the calendar dates and the smells and the faces, and I recognized, too, the hinge where everything had turned the first time. The hinge was him.

Not this time.

“I’m marrying Daniel,” I repeated, softer. “Take a breath, Mom. He’s the one I can respect.”

“You and Simon have been—” She stopped herself, the phrase inseparable catching in her teeth. The old me practically floated in rooms he entered. The new me kept her feet on the floor.

You don’t get many rewrites. You get one, if the universe is feeling generous. In my first life, after the Hughes wedding, our company’s balance sheet bloomed like a desert after rain. Partnerships, contracts, capital—everything tilted toward us. The Hughes patriarch had clapped his calloused hands and declared me lucky, as if I were a talisman he could install in a boardroom. The more he believed it, the more I pretended the cold in my bed didn’t carry a name. I told myself I was happy. I told myself too often to be telling the truth.

So when my mother asked who I wanted to marry, I didn’t pick the heir with a room of secrets. I picked the man who, in my first life, never married at all. The only Hughes who talked to me like a person instead of a moon pulling tides.

Daniel Hughes was ten years younger than Simon’s father and two decades wiser than most men I’d met. I remembered him from holidays: quiet in corners, listening to noise like a musician trying to find the true note. He sent books instead of flowers. He showed up with help instead of speeches. He felt like space I could breathe in.

“You always said you’d marry Simon,” my mother tried again, by reflex. “People will talk.”

“They always do,” I said. “Let them get new material.”

That night I drew. The studio smelled like chalk dust and needle oil. For years I had designed dresses that fit Simon’s taste: clean to the point of absence, silhouettes that looked expensive because they never risked saying anything. This time I reached for silk that moved like water under moonlight and hand-stitched a line of tiny seed beads into a pattern only visible when you stood close enough to ask permission. The skirt was an essay in movement. The bodice held its own spine.

This time the dress would be mine.

While I worked, the city performed its rituals: helicopters ferrying rich impatience across the basin, coyotes stitching the dry hills, billboards selling redemption for the price of a night. Somewhere, Simon turned in expensive sheets and dreamed about Audrey. I stitched into the quiet a new sentence for my life.

 

Part II: The Party and the Car

News travels faster than grief. Three days after the public announcement of my engagement to Simon—an arrangement my mother had hustled into rumors and RSVPs before my second life had time to decide—I walked into a party I should have avoided. The room smelled like whiskey and lemon oil. Simon’s friends clustered near the bar, practiced cruelty pressed into the buttons of their suits.

“Look, Simon,” one of them called, already smiling. “Your shadow learned to walk.”

“Bianca,” another chimed in, voice sliding on ice, “let the poor man enjoy his party before you put your name on his bank accounts.”

In my first life, I’d turned that mockery into a cage and lived in it because quiet hurt more than noise. In this one, I squared my shoulders and let myself be the main character of my own face.

“I’m not marrying you,” I said, and meant it in all the rooms that mattered.

They laughed. Of course they did.

Simon arrived late to the scene he assumed was about him. Beautiful men are taught that rooms are mirrors. He looked annoyed that I had a reflection not shaped like his. “Are you truly this desperate,” he asked under his breath, “to belong to a family that never voted?”

“I didn’t ask your permission,” I said. “I’m marrying Daniel.”

It was like telling a golden retriever that the ball doesn’t belong to him. His confusion slid into anger and then into something amused and feral. “I’ll let this engagement slide,” he murmured, leaning close enough that I could count his eyelashes, “but remember—you’ll never get the license. That paper goes to the person I actually want.”

In my first life, this is the exact sentence he didn’t say out loud. He simply did it. We signed the papers in a registrar’s office that smelled like toner, and I pretended it meant something. Now he was telling me the plan like a dare. A thought slid through me like an uninvited hand: Had he been reborn, too?

My cousin Audrey appeared before I could decide. She wore tears like jewelry—sparkle deployed to maximum effect. “I heard you two were getting married,” she sobbed loudly enough to alert cameras that had been bored. “I hope you’re happy.”

She ran. He followed.

When they returned, their fingers were intertwined like a promise, his neck marked by the evidence she always pretended to be too delicate to leave. In the old story, I would have made a scene, knocked something handmade to the floor. In this one, I breathed. The little arrogant smile he wore began to look like it hurt.

“It’s late,” he said stiffly when the party thinned. “Let me drive you.”

Free rides are still free. I walked to the car. When I reached for the back seat, he blocked the passenger door with a gallantry so scripted it should have come with footnotes. He tucked Audrey into the front seat. “She gets carsick,” he informed me gravely.

In the back, I watched their conversation perform itself. At a red light, Audrey asked for her lip balm and held his gaze like a coin he needed change for. The air in the car thickened. He checked the rearview as though he’d forgotten I had eyes. I looked out the window at a city I was finally seeing, and his face faltered.

At my building, he caught my arm and tossed a small velvet box into my hand. “Your engagement gift,” he said, voice made of the kind of charity that poisons wells. “Keep your place. I, at least, will give you a voice on paper. Everyone will think you’re my wife.”

“And who will be your wife?” I asked, without moving.

He didn’t pretend. “Audrey.”

“Then marry her in daylight,” I said. “Or keep losing dark.”

Upstairs, my phone buzzed. A video from Audrey. The bracelet in the velvet box matched the necklace he fastened at her throat in the clip. Their kiss was theatrical and precise. “After the wedding,” she said to camera with the same voice she’d used on me since childhood when she wanted my toy, “he’ll marry me legally. No license, no inheritance, Bianca. You know how this family works. It’s my turn.”

She had been reborn, too.

The second life was crowded now: two people who thought they could outsmart fate by doing the same thing faster, meaner. They were using the script as a weapon, and they wanted me to bleed on schedule.

I put the bracelet on the table and left it there like a lie I would no longer wear. In the morning, I went to my studio, opened a new roll of silk, and started cutting a future that belonged to my hands.

 

Part III: Daniel’s Doorway

When my mother said, “Daniel’s back in five days,” the world clicked into place like a bead finding its knot. Daniel, who had never married in our first life. Daniel, who once passed me a plate at Thanksgiving with the kind of care reserved for breakable heirlooms. Daniel, who made a habit of asking questions and then listening like answers might change him.

He arrived with jet lag softened by good manners and a tan that didn’t look like it needed to be seen. He hugged my parents, shook my father’s hand like a person who remembers how much a hand matters. When his gaze found mine, it didn’t do the math men do when they’re deciding what to take.

“So,” he said in the front hall while my mother pretended to look for napkins in a drawer she never used. “You’re really going to marry me?”

“If you want to,” I answered. “I need you to know I’m not a charm. I won’t be put in a boardroom like a plant.”

He smiled—genuine, a flash of mischief. “Good. I already have enough plants. They judge me. I forget to water them.”

He didn’t try to win me with gifts. He changed his schedule to match my studio hours and sat on a stool while I pinned muslin mockups to a dress form, asking questions that didn’t try to prove anything. “Does this line say what you want it to?” he asked, and no man had ever asked me that. Simon had told me what looked rich. Daniel asked if something looked like me.

Days braided into a week like a good story. We ate tacos on the studio floor and got salsa on a pattern. He laughed, not because it was cute, but because it was real. He took my sketches seriously and my silences more seriously. When he touched my hand, he did it like a person aware that hands make and unmake worlds.

The dinner to celebrate his return was a performance the Hughes family had held across decades: servants making it look effortless; the patriarch gold and granite at the head of the table; women shining like they translated the light. Simon arrived with smugness tucked like a pocket square. Audrey wore the necklace—the twin to my unclaimed bracelet—like a question and an answer.

During the main course, she laughed with a volume calibrated to reach me and called him “love” twice for the benefit of the aunt who didn’t approve of women who spoke in public. Simon kept glancing at me with a dare in his eyebrows. In another life, I would have thrown a glass. In this one, I tightened my fingers around Daniel’s hand under the table and sipped water like I was training for an event.

“Are you okay?” Daniel’s mouth barely moved. His thumb brushed the pulse at my wrist like a secret.

“Not yet,” I said. “But I will be.”

After dessert, my mother, whose instincts had been starved by social survival, said the thing everyone was thinking: “Isn’t it funny how everything worked out? Bianca with Daniel. Simon with Audrey. Fate.”

It was not funny. It was a trap. I smiled and said nothing, because sometimes the bravest thing in a room is silence.

In the parking lot, under the false privacy of expensive LEDs, Simon leaned against the passenger door of my Uber and tilted his head like a man in a cologne ad. “This is a pathetic act,” he murmured.

“You’re a pathetic act,” I replied. “A long one.”

“Do you really think Daniel can protect you from this family?” he asked, compassion coating the contempt. “They need you now that they believe in your luck. But luck is not love. They’ll take what they want and leave the rest of you in a guest room. I’ll marry Audrey legally, and you’ll still be the wife they bring to charity balls. You’ll be invited everywhere and wanted nowhere. It’s your talent.”

“You mistake me for my old self,” I said. “She died in a locked room. I buried her with the photos.”

He laughed, but his eyes flinched at the edges, as if something sharp in my voice had found a soft place in him.

The next morning a local website posted a sleek character assassination. Social climber Bianca Duarte, the headline read. Faux engagement to secure inheritance. The photos were bad edits, the quotes added spice. The timing was surgical.

I didn’t call my mother. I called Marcelo—a journalist who still owed my father for a story that helped save a union contract years ago. “I have a file,” I told him. “And I need you to publish it. All of it.”

“Are you sure?” he asked, voice stripped of flourish.

“Yes,” I said. “Even the video.”

I sent the proof: Audrey’s necklace kiss; voice notes in which she thanked me for “stepping aside so true love could flourish”; a draft contract from the Hughes legal folder repurposing my name as leverage for an inheritance, with a clause that read like a cage in good paper. In the email body I typed a question I wanted the city to ask itself: When did we start calling women lucky when what we mean is useful?

Two days later the city learned how to read.

 

Part IV: Fire

Scandal is a word people use when they mean justice arrived on camera. “Hughes Heiress Scheme Exposed,” the morning news said. By noon, it was “Hughes Empire Built on Lies?” By evening, the honking in front of the Hughes tower was not traffic. Stocks stumbled. Investors called lawyers who called other lawyers who called my phone at odd hours and threatened politely. The patriarch demanded loyalty in a voice that had made men kneel. It didn’t work on numbers.

I didn’t watch it like a movie. I watched it like a person standing in a room where a ceiling buckles. You move quickly and don’t make speeches. Daniel called that night from a number that came up as Unknown because the family had started moving through hotel rooms like people who change addresses to confuse consequences.

“Was it you?” he asked, and I heard not accusation, but inventory.

“Yes,” I said.

“Thank you,” he whispered, like he’d been holding his breath in rooms where the air didn’t tell the truth. “Do you still want to marry me?”

“Do you still want to marry me?” I asked back, not coy, exact.

“Now more than ever,” he said. And for a moment, the world felt simple.

It lasted until morning. My mother pounded on my door at 7:42 a.m., indignation applied like foundation. “What did you do?” she demanded on the threshold, not stepping in because it’s easier to prosecute a person you don’t share oxygen with.

“What I had to,” I said. “I told the truth.”

“You humiliated them,” she snapped. “You humiliated us. Your father was dragged into meetings. The grocery store—people stared at me like—”

“Like you had chosen sides?” I asked.

“You had everything,” she said, her voice breaking into that familiar combination of pity and contempt. “Now you’ve thrown it away for spite.”

Everything. She meant a last name and a seat close enough to power to feel warm without ever being allowed to light a fire. She meant invitations and photographs and the privilege of being ignored in good rooms.

“The Hughes are the most powerful family in the city,” she said, the way a person might say the Pacific is wide. “You should have endured it.”

There is a point beyond which endurance is surrender. I shut the door gently and leaned my forehead against it until the wood cooled the heat behind my eyes. From that moment forward, I counted myself an orphan with a mother still breathing.

The war arrived in coward’s clothes: messages from numbers that promised to find me; emails rattling with edited threats; a lawsuit embedded in legalese like a nail in velvet. Daniel held steady. He showed up. He cooked pasta badly and ordered pizza well. “They’re desperate,” he said. “When people lose control, they flail.”

Audrey came back wearing black, the outfit a woman picks when she wants to look wronged and thin. She staged a scene in the lobby of my building, sunglasses off, voice thrown so the security camera could pick it up. “You think you won?” she hissed when I walked down the stairs because elevators make exits too convenient. “You made our grandfather sick. The company is collapsing. And now Daniel’s the favorite. He deserves it. You don’t.”

“You don’t know that word,” I said. “Deserve. You think it’s a birthright.”

“He’s a Hughes,” she said, stepping so close I could see the foundation in the hairline. “All Hughes choose their side. It won’t be yours.”

It was a good line. It stayed with me like a splinter. In the following days, Daniel changed—not in the ways that would give me permission to forget him, but in the ways people change when an inheritance starts asking questions about loyalty. He was gone more. His messages were shorter. When he came home late one night, an envelope fell from his coat. I picked it up and read it because I am a woman trained by survival to read what paper wants.

A merger agreement. A prenuptial draft. My name missing as if someone had set an eraser to my life and decided the dust didn’t matter.

“What is this?” I asked when he walked back into the room.

“It’s just a draft,” he said quickly. “They wanted—”

“They,” I repeated. “Not you.”

“They don’t trust you yet,” he said, hating the sentence even as he let it exist in the room.

Prisoners learn to hear the way a key turns. This one clicked and locked. “Audrey was right,” I said softly. “You’ll choose them.”

“I haven’t chosen anything,” he said. “I’m in the middle.”

“Me too,” I said. “But I don’t have a name that buys me time. I have a spine. I won’t be paper again.”

He reached for me. I stepped back. “If you stand still,” I said, “you’re choosing. If you let them write drafts of my life, you’re choosing. I won’t be a bargaining chip, Daniel. Not in this life.”

I slept elsewhere that night and woke with a future that felt heavier and clearer.

 

Part V: Building a Name That Wasn’t Borrowed

I launched the brand with a story and a dress. The story was about a girl who thought love could outrun contracts. The dress was silk that flowed the way I wished time would when I wanted a moment to last, and cut the way truth does when it needs to separate you from something that’s killing you. I posted sketches—my hand steady, my notes messy. I posted a video of me ripping the stitches out of a bodice I’d made to please someone else’s eye. I called the collection “After.”

Women found it. Not because I was clever. Because I told the truth. They wrote back with their own drafts of captivity: mothers-in-law who turned affection into leverage; bosses who called them lucky and meant useful; men who kept rooms locked and told them the keys were ugly. My inbox became a place where stories rested before they learned how to walk.

Orders outpaced my capacity to sew. I hired seamstresses who had aged out of other people’s patience. I hired interns who could set a sleeve and a boundary. Influencers wore my pieces because they looked like themselves in them, not like advertisements for the people paying their mortgages.

The Hughes legal team sued me for “misuse of private information for commercial gain.” I laughed in a lawyer’s office and handed over a black binder: consent forms from everyone who had allowed me to publish their name; a thumb drive with audio files in which Audrey thanked me for “stepping aside”; the forged addendum of a different war which proved I had learned how to spot a fake rule across contexts; and a letter from Marcelo stating that all profits from the initial article went to a fund for sheltering women whose “luck” had been weaponized.

In court, the judge listened like he’d been waiting his whole career to do something besides measure damages. The Hughes attorney sniffed words like they had gone off. I told the truth without sharpening it. When they asked if I had wanted to hurt the family, I said I had wanted to stop being hurt by them.

The case turned on a line in their own contract—a clause that referred to me as a “perception asset.” I didn’t have to make a speech. The city made it for me. Headlines that used to call me clingy learned how to spell my name without the Hughes attached. Investors who had dated power refused to be photographed with it. The tower downtown folded its shoulders inward and learned how to be quiet.

Simon was seen at an airport with a suitcase and a haircut that tried to pretend he hadn’t been himself. Audrey moved through new rooms wearing the same face and found the lights less interested. Daniel didn’t call, and I decided that was love, too—the kind you give by leaving a person to the work they have to do alone.

 

Part VI: The Dress I Finished and the Ending I Chose

I finished the dress—the one I started the night I told my mother no. It had taken longer than it needed to because I had kept stopping to ask other people what they thought of me. I stitched the last seam while rain found the city and washed the air clean enough to breathe without making excuses for anyone.

The runway show was in a warehouse that used to hold abandoned sets and now held something like hope. The audience was a mix of people who had underestimated me and learned to use their eyes, and people who had never made that mistake. Lights rose. Models walked in garments that said yes in a dozen languages: yes to wanting, yes to leaving, yes to standing up when you need to. The final look was the dress. I didn’t put it on a model. I stepped onto the runway in it and felt the floor carry me.

At the end, I stopped, as you do, and the room exhaled like a single animal.

I took a small velvet box out of the dress pocket and opened it. The bracelet lay inside, the one Simon had thrown at me like charity or a claim. I snapped it shut and set it gently on the floor at the end of the runway—a relic, a warning, an exhibit. Then I stepped around it and walked back into light.

After the show, a young woman approached, eyes wide the way they get when a person sees a map they didn’t know they were allowed to follow. “Do you still believe in love?” she asked, half daring me to give up something she still wanted.

“Yes,” I said. “But I believe in freedom more. The right person won’t ask you to choose.”

In the months that followed, I traveled not to escape but to arrive. Pop-ups in cities that had written me into smallness and then learned better. A store in Mexico City where the sales associates were women other companies had decided had aged out of being seen. A workshop in Seoul where we taught hand-finishing like meditation. I kept a day free every week for a lecture in a place that could not afford a dress. I called the talk “Drafts,” and I gave away patterns at the end because not everything you make should be for sale.

Sometimes, late, the city around my studio went quiet enough for me to hear the old story trying the lock. It found I had changed the key. Sometimes, too, I thought of Daniel, the way he listened, the way he had let the old world put new paper between us because the old world is heavy and people are tired. I didn’t hate him. I kept a soft place for the man who almost chose me and hoped he’d learn to choose himself.

On a Sunday in spring, I walked out onto my balcony with coffee and a notebook and answered emails without apologizing for the boundaries in them. A message waited from my mother. It was short. It said: I was wrong. I’m learning. I didn’t reply that day. Forgiveness is a hammer, and the job ahead was delicate work. I wrote back later, when I trusted my grip.

The city glittered, ridiculous and sincere. Somewhere below, a billboard advertised a product that promised to make you a better version of your face. I laughed and turned the page and sketched a jacket with pockets deep enough to hold a phone, a key, two candy bars, and a future.

Reborn or not, this life is mine. No rooms are locked that I cannot leave. No contracts write me. No last name makes a chair my jail. If love finds me, it will sit beside me, not on me. If it doesn’t, I will still be here, stitching truth into silk and showing women where to find the seam that gives way when you pull it with both hands.

The story people expected was a wedding. The ending I wrote was a woman walking herself down an aisle she built, past a bracelet she refused, toward a door she opened and held for anyone who wanted out.

END!

Disclaimer: Our stories are inspired by real-life events but are carefully rewritten for entertainment. Any resemblance to actual people or situations is purely coincidental.