Part 2The Unchosen

Cassandra and I were a product of a corporate merger in human form. Her grandfather and my own had been friends, business partners who had sealed a pact with the promise of a marriage between their families. But that promise was originally meant for Leo. He was, after all, the Harrison family’s little prince, cherished for eighteen years.

I was the biological son they’d discovered by accident. The changeling.

Before I was a Harrison, a girl like Cassandra—class valedictorian, campus queen, heiress to a billion-dollar empire—was in a different universe. We would never have met, let alone fallen in love.

Then, at eighteen, my biological parents found me. They showed up in a black town car at the group home where I lived, weeping about a hospital mix-up, a careless nurse, a stolen life. I saw their expensive clothes and imagined a future of ease. A future where I wouldn’t have to collect cans to pay for textbooks, where I wouldn’t have to worry if the underfunded home could afford to send me to college.

But the reunion didn’t bring the tearful apologies and lavish affection I’d read about in novels. It brought a polite, cold distance. That’s fine, I told myself. As long as I can go to school, that’s all that matters.

They told me Leo’s biological parents had passed away, so he would be staying. He was their son. But their treatment of us was night and day. I wasn't the son of the house; I felt more like the chauffeur's kid.

The reason they finally needed me came in the form of a catastrophe. Cassandra, the brilliant, untouchable girl Leo had been trailing after for years, had a horrific car accident. The doctors said her leg was permanently damaged. She would walk with a limp for the rest of her life.

For a woman like her, it was a devastating blow. It wasn't just about the loss of grace, but the inability to ever again wear the beautiful heels and short dresses she loved.

Leo, upon hearing the news, had a screaming tantrum. He would not, he declared, marry a “cripple.”

And so, the duty fell to me.

I could have refused. But the image of that cool, stunning face, a face I hadn’t seen in over a year since starting college, flashed in my mind. On a strange, self-destructive impulse, I agreed.

I was twenty, about to start my sophomore year at Columbia. My new parents had me withdraw from my classes and, at an age when most guys are figuring out their majors, I married into the Sterling dynasty.

When I went to see her before the wedding, she was a storm of fury. She hurled a vase that shattered at my feet. “Get out! Tell Leo to come see me!” she screamed.

But Leo was already gone. My parents had given him a black card and sent him off to study abroad, far away from the inconvenient reality of his “damaged” fiancée. The Harrison family business depended on the Sterlings, and while Leo refused to marry Cassandra, someone had to maintain the alliance. I was the placeholder. The spare part.

It was the first and only time my mother, Mrs. Harrison, showed me anything resembling kindness. She cried, telling me how much the family was struggling, how pitiful poor Leo was, how my father’s hair was turning gray from stress.

I was unmoved. Why all the drama? I was marrying Cassandra because I wanted to. Not for them. For her.