Sweet Romance12 min read
The Substitute Bride and the Man Who Would Protect Her
ButterPicks10 views
I never imagined the night would feel so thin—like a page barely holding its ink. When he said, "It's getting late. Let's sleep," the voice dragged me back from the edge of panic.
"Sleep?" I whispered, fingers nervously twisting the hem of my wedding dress. My name is Ginevra Santiago. I was a substitute bride—traded like a piece in a ledger to secure money that could keep my mother alive. I had never been in a room like that before, never faced a man who looked like he had swallowed the moon.
He stepped out of the bathroom like a carved statue, steam drying in the air behind him. He smelled faintly of soap and something else—smoke, maybe, and iron.
"You're shaking," he said, not unkindly. "Go wash up."
"I—I'll wash," I breathed. The door to the small, rickety bathroom had no latch. My hands trembled as if they held a bird. I scrubbed my face until my fingers went numb. I had walked here through mud on the wedding day; wind ripped at the veil. No car with ribbons. Just the old van and the road that swallowed my shoes.
When I stepped back out, I found him on the bed, towel around his waist. My body betrayed me: the towel slipped. He looked up, and for a moment I thought the world stopped.
"Time to sleep," he said again, and he emphasized the small, simple word—"we." His voice was low, warm, and something in it made my skin go thin.
"I... I don't know how to be a wife," I managed.
He sat up. "Do you know my name?" he asked.
"I know... Jason." I said the name someone had told me. It fit him like armor.
He smiled the smallest smile, but it reached nowhere I could touch. He could see through the plaster and paint to whatever I hid behind. "Tonight you want to sleep. Tomorrow we'll take care of the rest."
He rolled onto his side and pretended to sleep, but I stayed awake until the house sighed and the crickets cleaned the night. When I finally slept, I dreamed of a carved wooden box he'd given me in the morning—the one with the old necklace and the smooth bracelet, the one he said was "everything I have left."
The next morning he was up before dawn, training in the yard—bare chest, hands wrapped, punching rhythmically. He looked like he could tear the sky. I tried my voice out: "Have you eaten?"
"Not yet," Jason said, with a flicker that softened his face. "You make breakfast."
I moved like someone learning new gravity. I cooked little things, simple porridge, eggs, a pan of beef I sliced too thick. He ate, then punched a bag again. His knuckles were rough and calloused. Once, without thinking, I offered him a piece of the meat. He looked up. "Eat more," he said, startling me with the tenderness.
We went about our days like two actors in a small play—quiet, polite. He watched me with an unreadable patience. I was a substitute; I was acting the part of my sister, Natalia Daley, who had refused the marriage to a poor man she looked down on. My father, Cedric Cooper, had promised me a dowry if I took her place—money for my mother's treatment, for my brother Cyril Schulz's education.
I had shepherded the truth like a fragile animal.
He also had secrets. Once, a phone buzzed and he froze, the word "work" tightening his jaw. He spoke into the handset in a voice I had not heard—sharp, distant.
"Keep digging," he said to the person on the other end. "Not yet. I'm not going back."
Later I learned a sliver: Jason Johansson wasn't simply a poor villager. He was a man hiding in a small body, carrying another man's name and an ancient debt. The more I watched him, the thinner my certainty became. He was fierce and distant; he let me cook, let me come and go, but he also protected me in ways that made me feel both sheepish and safe.
"Are you leaving for the city?" I asked one afternoon as we walked back from the little bridal shop he had bought me out of.
"I will," he said. "But not yet. Not while it's dangerous."
He had friends—Etienne Harper and Ernst Andrews—voices that reached him in the night through phones and through men who swept into town with business and bad jokes. They were the ones pressing him to take action, to find out who had sabotaged a certain accident, whose hand had pushed a plane into a sea of trouble years ago. He kept his past close, and since I was a substitute, I felt like a shadow walking beside him, watching him carry the life he had paused.
"You're worried about your family," he said gently another morning, seeing the callousing of my face when I checked my brother's messages. "Go home for a day, get the dowry back."
"Jason, you don't have to—" I began, and he cut me off with a look that landed like a promise.
"I don't like being told who you are or what you are to them," Jason said. "But I will do this for you."
He bought me the expensive gown at the boutique, made the arrogant clerk kneel to measure me properly, and paid for a bespoke version that made the room hush. People stared then, because such things were not expected of a man they thought simple. "Why would you—" I tried to ask, but he only said, stubborn as a winter, "Because I do not like to see you mocked."
I went to my family, the Cooper house that once had the lights but often had cold faces. Natalia Daley greeted me with a knife-shaped smile. She flaunted a necklace—flashed it like a trophy of cruelty.
"What dowry?" she sneered when I asked. "Father is gone; he forgot the date. You were never a daughter who mattered."
"I came for the money," I said, because the truth tasted like metal and it needed to be said. "I took my sister's place and you took my dowry."
She laughed and lifted the diamond chain like a sting. "This? Thirty thousand. Your father never planned to give you anything. You were cast out. You—" she narrowed her eyes, "—you are lucky to be useful."
My face burned. I thought of my mother's cough that rattled like a freight train in the night. I thought of Cyril, younger and too quiet. I realized what Natalia had done—sold the wedding's grace for a necklace sold behind my back.
I ran out, but the rain chose that moment to fall, and the sky seemed to try to wash my small heart away. I called out to Jason, but he had already known. The next day, men came to my father's office with documents. There was a proposal for an old parcel of family land—ten million dollars' worth of ground. Etienne Harper had spoken gracefully; his words were surgical. The deal turned, the ground was auctioned, and the Cooper name had to choose—either fight publicly and lose face, or hand over the small payment now to buy mercy.
At noon, my family was called into the town square—one of those places where neighbors watched the theater of disgrace. Jason stood in the crowd, the way a sentinel does, face blank as stone. Etienne and Ernst stood like two judges with bad jokes in their mouths.
Natalia stepped forward, to a little applause. "Ginevra," she called out—she used the name as if I had stolen it from her own mouth. "You took my place and left us nothing. The dowry was mine. I spent it the only way I knew how. I had to save our name."
"Is that true?" I asked, but it was the kind of question that makes a person sound small.
A lawyer—Ernst Andrews—cleared his throat and tossed a handful of papers on the table. "The record shows the chain was bought by Mr. Cedric Cooper's account," he said. "There is a bank transfer and receipts."
Natalia's smile faltered. "I—" She tried to gather herself, but Etienne called out, and the square fell oddly silent.
"Is this what you call repaying?" Etienne moved toward the assembled crowd. "You take what was promised and convert it into your own personal keeping? You tell us you'd give Ginevra the dowry then you go buy a necklace?"
The murmurs became louder. Voices ripple like broken ropes. "She lied," someone said. "She stole your money." People turned to me, and some of them looked as if they had been waiting to smile.
"Wait!" Natalia's voice tried to climb back. "You can't—"
Jason stepped forward. His voice was low, but the way he spoke carried across the square. "You took her dowry, Natalia, and sold it. You thought no one would know. You thought she would take the blame for being born to less. But you sold it to buy a ring—and you thought your life would remain unmarked."
People leaned in. I could feel their breath like weather.
"You used a daughter's future as currency," Jason continued. "You used her mother's health and her brother's school as reasons to trap her into silence. And for what? A necklace?"
"You—" She screamed at him, because the crowd had turned like a glass table into a hundred knives. "You have no right—"
"I have right because she married under false pretenses," Jason said. He pulled out his phone and showed the crowd a string of messages—the ones that proved the transfer, the ones that tied Natalia to the jewel merchant. The market watch—Jason had bought the auction rights. Etienne had found proof that the jewel came from a chain of fence deals. The face of my sister paled. People around started taking pictures, whispering.
"This is theft," Ernst said, so coldly the word sounded like a verdict. "And this is fraud. If a daughter is coerced and promises made and not fulfilled—that is public deception."
The crowd shifted. Old men who had smiled at Natalia's confidence now looked at her with something like pity. I watched as her mask slipped. She moved from arrogance to shock, then to desperate denial. "You can't do this," she cried. "Father—"
He was already gone. He had always been indifferent at best. The neighbors had always had their own small disappointments to hold.
The punishment unfolded with the clarity of slow paint drying. I wanted to hide. Natalia's face changed—first defiant, then furious, then pleading. She ran to the veranda and tried to climb toward the house to avoid the gossip, but it only made the spectacle worse. People began to chant, a bitter countersong.
"Shame!" someone shouted. "Shame!"
"How dare you!" Jason said quietly, and his words cut deeper than the shouted ones. He had the floor, and he did not use it to gloat.
"Return what you stole," he told her, and Etienne and Ernst produced a list: a notarized demand, a statement for the local magistrate, an inventory of the property. The women in the crowd filmed, their thumbs humming like locusts. Natalia's face—so polished with cruelty—began to dampen with the first beads of public downfall.
She pleaded at first. "I didn't—" "I'm sorry—" But then, as demands continued, the crowd started to turn into an audience for her undoing. People walked up and asked for explanations—neighbors who had once sat at the same table started to ask for the money they claimed she had borrowed. A man, a contractor who had sold her the so-called 'investment' laughed into his sleeve as he counted the receipts. The necklace—flashy, a crude imitation—was brought out and someone had the audacity to test it with a little stone; it cracked in the daylight, revealing the fraud.
Natalia's reactions were a cascade: from red-faced anger to an almost animal panic. She begged me to forgive her—she begged the crowd. "Please—I'll give it back, I can—"
They recorded her phone call. They demanded an apology to my mother, to my brother. She tried to stand with dignity, but dignity had left her the moment she'd taken my future.
When the magistrate's clerk arrived, the humiliation turned legal. He stood under the loud sun and read a statement: Natalia Daley was accused of deception and misappropriation of funds meant as dowry. The legal consequences could mean public registration of guilt—an entry that would follow her name for years. The crowd whooped and booed and threw questions like pebbles.
She crumpled in the square in the end, not from the legal weight but from the social one. The bystanders, once gleeful, now stared with morbid fascination as she changed from predator to prey. The faces around me were many—Jeers, cameras, whispered tales. It went on until evening, until the sun wheeled down and made the square a bowl for gossip to sink into.
Jason stayed by my side the whole time. His hand rested on the small of my back, steady, like a rail. I felt his thumb rub slow circles. He had not shouted. He had not gnashed like a bloodthirsty man. Instead he had shown proof, method, and an unrelenting will to make truth break through lies. It was more terrifying than a brawl.
After the crowd dispersed, when the square emptied to a few lingering cameras and a mocking baker, I turned to him.
"That was—" I could not find a word that fit.
"You didn't do this alone," he said. "But you didn't deserve that. No one does."
He walked me home like a soldier returning a treasure.
That scene of my sister's public undoing was only the first punishment. The others were smaller, crueler, and tailored to fit each villain's pride.
At work, the woman who had made my first weeks hell—Helene Brooks—tried to humiliate me again by having a so-called expert inspect my ring in front of the office. She was the kind of person who used every rule and every look as a blade. She wanted a spectacle in the conference room to prove I was a liar. Instead, Isaac Johnson—an elder man with gentle eyes and a reputation for authenticity—handled the ring with white gloves and looked up slowly.
"This is an emerald," he said softly. "Not imitation. The setting is old; its provenance is Hougaard foundry markings. This is not a trinket. Whoever questioned this had better—"
Helene's smile collapsed. The office gathered round like a chorus, and they muttered. Her reaction moved through an arc I had watched earlier in Natalia: smugness, uncertainty, incredulousness, and finally the rawness of exposure. People speculated. The rumor—seeded by Helene's own accusations—came back to shame her. She had tried to belittle me by calling me a thief. The accusation turned on her, and she found herself forced to apologize publicly in the team meeting, her voice thin, seeing her social currency drained.
But Helene's fall was different. Where Natalia was stripped of familial trust, Helene lost authority. She discovered she could not command respect if she traded it for cruelty. Her actions cost her the trust of the people who mattered in the company. She lost clients. Her mentor pulled funding. She had to attend public HR hearings. The punishment was slow and bureaucratic, but it hurt.
Then there was Fernando Ruiz—my supervisor's counterpart, a man who had once tried to cross boundaries with me. Jason found out, the way Jason finds things: methodically, with patience. I kept a small voice recorder, a trick he had taught me after one bad night. When I finally played it in front of the right people—Ernst and Isaac and the legal counsel—Fernando's words fell like stones.
"I can get you what you want," the recording captured him saying. "You know what to do."
He blustered; he tried to claim it was out of context, that he was offering help, that his voice had been distorted. But the tape was clear, the sequence precise. In a meeting for the board's HR, they played it. Fernando's face changed. He tried to deny, but the truth had the advantage.
He was suspended. His projects were reassigned. And when he walked down the office corridor afterward, people looked away. That anonymity—an eroded network—was a punishment tailored for a man who built himself on influence. Without it, he had nothing.
In all of these unmaskings, the villain’s movements went through the same small stages: the arrogance of the untouchable, the tremor of exposure, the frantic denial, and the final shyness of a punished creature. Surrounding them were the witnesses who had once laughed now recording. Some people applauded. Some people watched quietly. But all of them learned that cruelty can return like a mirror.
If the square had been a theater in my childhood, work had become a court. I felt the lines of my life tighten like a braid. Each villain fell in a distinct way: Natalia publicly humiliated in front of neighbors and relatives—her face a study in crumbling entitlement; Helene stripped of power and public respect inside the company; Fernando left isolated and sanctioned. Each punishment lasted long enough to make them rethink their choices. They each reacted differently—nervous laughter, denials that grew thin, and then, finally, a pleading that did not come with the same ease as the insults.
Through it all, Jason did not ask me to stand in the square and gloat. He asked me to be brave, to hold evidence, to tell truth. He never sought revenge for its own sake. He wanted something cleaner—a rectified ledger. He wanted me to have the dignity of my mother's treatment and my brother's schooling. He wanted a world where a daughter who had been coerced could still stand tall.
"Why do you stay?" I asked him once, as we lay in that small bed after the long day had worn its grooves in us. The shriek of the world outside could not reach us.
He looked at me. "Because you are my wife," he said, and the way he said it made it into something I could hold. "Because you are my home."
There were mornings when we were hungry and he pretended not to notice the dwindling in our pantry. There were nights when I found him sitting at the window, the cigarette long gone out on the sill, thinking about a plane that had never returned, about family portraits that were torn. Once, I put my hand on his arm and discovered that beneath the rough calluses there were soft marks—places where someone had once held him too tightly.
"Are you sure?" I asked, because I was always a little suspicious of men who made promises when there was no way to honor them.
"The only thing I'm sure of," he said, "is that every day with you is a day I don't have to hide alone."
So we built a little life, with many pieces mended. I signed on at a company—sales, small accounts at first. I learned to speak my mind, to stand when insulted. Jason fought with facts; I fought with skill and kindness. Together we balanced.
One night, after a week of small victories, he kissed me in the kitchen—the kind of kiss that wasn't about possession but about being found. Then he looked at me shyly and said, "Will you let me take off your ring?"
I laughed. "What for?"
He shrugged, sheepish. "I want to keep it somewhere safe."
"Keep it where?" I asked.
"In the place where you can find it," he said. "In our home."
That was the first time I believed him when he said we had a life to share.
There were fights. There were nights when I felt like a fraud because I'd taken my sister's place. There were moments when I was tempted to tell everything—to start again and be honest. But Jason's patience taught me better. He never demanded my confession; he let me win at my own pace.
"Tell me later," he said once when my words got dangerous. "Tell me the whole thing when you are ready. I don't need the truth to love you, but I need you to be whole."
And so the truth came, in small pieces, like bread crumbs: my real name, the forgiveness I owed myself, the reasons I had lied. He handled it like someone holding a fragile bird—careful, quiet, fierce.
Our marriage was not the lyrical kind I had once read in books. It was real. It had bones.
We kept stumbling, but we kept each other upright.
One evening, at a small community dinner we hosted for neighbors, an older farmer returned my greeting with a grin. "Your husband," he said to me, nodding in Jason's direction, "he's a good man. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise."
I looked at Jason across the table. He was laughing with a child about how to throw a rock. His profile in the setting sun looked like a carved statue again—something sturdy to lean on.
I reached for his hand. For the first time since the wedding in the storm, I felt we had begun to thread a real stitch into our lives.
"Promise me one thing," Jason said later, softer than the evening.
"What?"
"Promise you'll let me protect you."
I laughed, then kissed him. "I already did."
The End
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