Chapter 4: The Seattle Intercept
We didn't go to the wedding.
When May arrived, Troy and I spent the weekend of Marin’s wedding in a small cabin in Cannon Beach, watching the fog roll over the ocean and drinking cheap wine by a wood stove. I turned off my phone completely for forty-eight hours. I didn't want to see the photos. I didn't want to see Marin in her actual wedding dress, surrounded by Seattle’s elite, looking like she had finally won the game she had been playing her whole life.
But three weeks after the wedding, the storm found me anyway.
I was working at my boutique graphic design studio in downtown Portland when my assistant told me there was someone in the lobby asking for me.
"Did they leave a name?" I asked, looking up from my tablet.
"She said her name is Elizabeth Sterling," my assistant whispered, looking slightly intimidated. "Sarah, she looks like she stepped out of a Vogue magazine, and she has a driver waiting in a Mercedes outside."
My heart did a slow, heavy thud against my ribs. Sterling.
"Send her in," I said, standing up and smoothing my skirt.
Elizabeth Sterling was a woman in her late fifties, with perfectly coiffed silver-blonde hair, wearing a tailored navy suit that screamed quiet luxury. Her face was elegant but lined with a profound, exhausted tension.
"Saraphina," she said, her voice smooth and modulated. "Thank you for seeing me without an appointment."
"Mrs. Sterling," I said, gesturing to the leather chairs across from my desk. "Can I offer you some tea? Or water?"
"No, thank you," she said, sitting down and placing her Chanel handbag perfectly on her lap. She looked at me for a long moment, her sharp blue eyes assessing everything from my posture to the art on my walls. "You look remarkably like your sister, yet entirely different."
"I’ll take that as a compliment," I said carefully.
"It is," she replied dryly. "I won't beat around the bush, Saraphina. I am here because I believe I have made a terrible mistake, and my husband and I are currently trying to mitigate a disaster."
I leaned back in my chair. "This sounds like a conversation you should be having with Marin, or my mother."
"I have tried," Elizabeth said, a flash of genuine anger crossing her face. "Your mother is an enabler of the highest order, and your sister... well, your sister is a deeply manipulative young woman. Before the wedding, I had my doubts. Marin was entirely too perfect. She loved everything Bradley loved, she agreed with every opinion my husband held, she had no history, no flaws, no past."
"Marin is very good at being a mirror," I murmured. "She reflects whatever people want to see until she gets what she wants."
"Precisely," Elizabeth nodded. "But a week ago, Bradley’s accountant noticed a discrepancy. Marin had been given a supplementary credit card for wedding incidentals. In three weeks, she charged nearly eighty thousand dollars to it. Not for the wedding—the wedding was already paid for. She bought luxury handbags, jewelry, and wired twenty thousand dollars directly to an account registered to an Arthur Vance."
I closed my eyes. My father. They were using Bradley’s family to bail themselves out of the debt they had incurred trying to throw a wedding they couldn't afford.
"When Bradley confronted her," Elizabeth continued, her voice trembling slightly now, "she didn't cry. She didn't apologize. She threw a vase at his head, screamed that he was controlling her, and threatened to go to the Seattle tabloids with stories of emotional abuse if he tried to restrict her access to the accounts."
I let out a slow breath. "That sounds like Marin."
"My son is broken," Elizabeth said, her eyes softening with a mother’s genuine grief. "He loved her, Saraphina. He thought he was saving a beautiful, sweet girl from a dysfunctional family. That is the story she told him, you know. She told him that she was the outcast. She told him that her younger sister, Saraphina, was a deeply unstable, jealous woman who had hired security thugs to violently assault her and throw her out of your wedding because you couldn't stand her beauty."
A cold laugh escaped my throat. "She told him that?"
"She did," Elizabeth said, pulling a leather-bound folder from her bag. "But I am not an idiot, Saraphina. I hire people to look into things when my family’s reputation is at stake. My investigators found the security footage from your venue. I watched the video. I saw your sister arrive in a full bridal gown. I saw her screaming at the gates. And I saw you walk down that aisle without looking back."
She looked at me, her gaze piercing.
"I saw a woman with immense dignity," Elizabeth said softly. "And I realized that day that we had married the wrong sister’s family. I need the truth, Saraphina. If Bradley is going to divorce her—and he is—we need to know what else she is hiding. I need to know what she did to you. I need the ammunition to end this marriage before she ruins my son's life completely."
I looked at the folder in her hands. For years, I had dreamed of the moment the world would see Marin for what she was. I had dreamed of someone finally pulling back the curtain on the golden child.
May you like
But looking at this mother, whose only crime was wanting to protect her son, I didn't feel a sense of petty triumph. I just felt a profound, deep sadness for the boy who had fallen into Marin’s trap.
"Sit back, Mrs. Sterling," I said, reaching for a notepad. "It’s a very long story. Let’s start with high school."
