Sweet Romance14 min read
Wisteria Promises
ButterPicks10 views
"I married him for twenty thousand a month," I said that to myself like a secret I could swallow.
"You signed the contract?" my friend asked, half shocked, half jealous.
"Yes," I told her. "He pays and I care for his little boy. It's an agreement. One year."
"You sure that's all?" she blinked.
I was sure. I had been sure for years. I had loved York Carter like a stubborn fever since I was small, since I hid his school badge in my diary and traced the letters on rainy nights. He had been farther than any star—his life glided ahead on a track I could never reach. Then he fell into my world like a comet: returned as the company's new owner, single father, handsome and distant. The office buzzed like bees.
"He's divorced and has a child," my coworker whispered one morning, leaning over our desk. "So handsome."
"He's got a kid," another sighed. "Poor thing."
"Could be your chance," she added, meaning well. I only smiled and hid the ache.
"Jovie, deliver this file," my team leader snapped, pointing.
"I—my lipstick—" I fumbled.
"You and snacks again? If you won't work, don't stay," she scolded.
I was about to stammer when the door opened. York stood there like someone who belonged in light.
"I ate it," he said, glancing at the team leader with a bored patience. "Any objections?"
"Uh..." the leader stuttered, then nodded. Everyone looked at me as if I had two hearts.
I had chased him for years—sat outside his school gates, read what I could about him, followed him across provinces until my shoes wore thin. Then I gave up. I lay down in the safety of giving up and found stability in small pleasures. He dropped into my life again by accident—our company hired him, he became my boss—and the world tilted.
"Want to marry me?" he asked me once, at an arranged match my grandmother set up.
"What?" I put my hands on the table and laughed too loud. "Why me?"
"You're plain-living," he said, simple and clear.
"Thank you for the compliment?" I replied, which was ridiculous and honest.
"Twenty thousand a year," he said after a pause, "I will pay you twenty thousand a year. Contract marriage. You keep your freedom."
"Why do you think twenty thousand—" I began.
A payment pinged through my phone. Twenty thousand landed in my account mid-sentence.
"I should push it back," I muttered. "I should slap him and return the money."
"I'm not twenty-five anymore; twenty-seven taught me other things," I told myself in the tiny bathroom mirror. "Choice: people or money? I choose money."
"Okay," I said, and signed.
We made it official in less than an hour. He handed me a marriage contract. My job was clear: take Colton Devine—his son—to and from school, be a tidy mother figure, but never reveal our relationship at work.
"I have two villas," he said before leaving for a business trip on our wedding day. "Pick one."
"A gift?" My voice trembled.
"Live in one." He gave me keys and started the car. "One week."
"One week?" My chest dropped.
"Don't waste your time on me," he added, as if that was necessary.
"Don't worry, I won't."
The first pickup at the kindergarten was its own small war.
"Your mom's here," the teacher announced.
The small boy looked up and said flatly, "She's not my mom."
I smiled, reached my hand out, and he shoved it away.
"He's used to someone else," the teacher told me, eyes kind. "He looks like his dad."
"Like his mom," some child cried. "That's his stepmom."
The words were knives. He flinched and walked ahead.
"Is he cold?" I asked once I had him in the car.
"I hate you," he announced without turning.
"Okay," I swallowed. "No problem."
That night I called York.
"Why is he upset?" I asked.
"Don't mind him," he said after a silence. "He didn't say anything."
"He said I was ugly," I offered.
"He's wrong," he said, and the way he spoke was soft enough to make my heart tighten.
I tried to be patient. I smiled at Colton's sudden tantrums. I laughed when he demanded two carts full of toys at the supermarket. The driver told me he was that way always. I nodded and did my job.
A few days later I saw him in the mall with a girl in the car. She clung to him, flirted, promised all sorts of things.
"Delete my number," he told her calmly. "Don't be cheap."
She left in a flurry of tears and I stood there like an intruder who had accidentally overheard a personal line of a life I wanted.
"You like him," my friend whispered later, both delighted and dangerous.
"I loved him," I said. "A long time ago. But I'm married as a contract. I get twenty thousand and a place to live."
He texted: "Want a bag?"
"What?" I stared.
"Send a photo of the bag you like." He did not wait for me to answer before adding, "I will buy it."
Then another ping: two thousand transferred. Smaller gifts came, and each small transfer stung like salted tea.
At the hospital my mother, Jen Hall, was admitted for cardiac surgery. Her voice, slurred by alcohol and time, scolded and accused on her worse days. The night before the operation she looked at me in the sterile corridor and said, "If I fail, see your sister in America."
"Don't talk like that," I snapped.
At the operation, the doctor told me they found two blocked arteries. "You are the only family," he said. "Sign here."
"Use the best," I wrote. My hand shook so badly I hardly read my name.
York appeared, quiet and steady, in the hospital corridor as if his magnets guided him.
"Why are you here?" I blurted when I recognized his voice.
He looked at me the way only the person who has seen you fall apart can look—patient, a little sad, and very owned. "You were the only one," he said.
He sat with me through the worst night. He heard me promise to keep my head, and he held a cup of tea for me.
When my mother woke, the relief was like salt in my tongue. We pushed through stitches and paperwork and small humiliations. When we left the hospital, York drove me without asking a thing. I didn't want him to see the apartment where I had grown up, the alleyways I knew by heart. I wanted to keep a little image of myself intact.
"You two are related?" an amused doctor asked once, when York and I misunderstood a comment in the hall.
"Employer and employee," I answered, too quickly.
York paused and then said, softly, "We used to live near a wisteria tree. I remember a girl once who threw herself into my arms. She called me 'big brother.'"
My throat tightened.
"That was me," I said.
He looked at me for a long time. "I never remembered your face clearly. I remember the night under the tree. That girl felt safe in my arms."
My whole childish plan—of going to the same school to win him back—was a child's foolishness. I had wanted him afraid to live without me. He had only been a passing light. Still, his voice when he spoke about the past made something in me warm.
Our marriage warded off gossip at work for a while because York kept our relationship secret. But secrets are fragile.
One evening I was at a grocery basement, and his black car rolled up. He was in the front seat with a young woman. My heart became a stone.
"Delete my contact," he told her, and the free air around his words cut the woman. She left crying. He looked at me once, like a camera capturing an image: regret, distance, explanation. I had no words; I was a spectator at my own life.
When the truth about Colton surfaced—Colton's features were familiar not because he looked like me but because he looked like Jacqueline Jaeger—I nearly collapsed. Colton showed me a photograph of his 'mom' and it was my sister. The world narrowed to a single cold fact: my sister Jacqueline and York were the child's parents. He had raised the boy out of grief, but the child belonged to Jacqueline.
"I can't believe it," I whispered. "You had a child with my sister?"
"Yes," York said quietly. "She left. She wanted to keep her life in America. I promised to raise him."
My blood ran cold and warm all at once. Jacqueline had once been an invisible myth in our house—a child who moved away and became a glossy magazine image in my mother's memory. The idea that she had been at the center of York's past felt like someone rearranging the furniture of my heart.
I asked him everything, mad and hurt. He did not lash out. He offered to take me to his parents' home. He introduced me to his grandfather, Julian Bernard, an old man with a blunt voice and surprising warmth. York's aunt fiddled with a faded embroidered cloth—a piece she had made for the man who died, the friend who had left behind a child. "It was for the wedding," she said, eyes heavy.
"Who?" I asked.
"For Cohen's wedding," she whispered. Cohen Bonner had been York's best friend who died in America. The story splintered: Cohen had been Colton's biological father; York had taken Colton in when the young mother left. He had kept the boy's name as a memory, a way of carrying Cohen forward into the world.
"I didn't tell you because I couldn't," York said to me later, his voice small. "I was messy, Jovie. I was afraid of hurting you."
"You should have told me," I said, because it was true and small and had claws.
He nodded. Instead of angry words, he took me into a strange quiet—wedding plans. His grandfather wanted a family. York asked me to stay.
I agreed because he was consistent in small ways: he learned Colton's favorite bedtime story; he waited for me at the office elevator like a lighthouse; he brought me tea without asking; he left me small gifts with notes. "Don't hide," he said once, "let me keep you."
Colton's heart softened. He started to call me "Aunt Jovie" at first, then "Mom" in small moments of need. I didn't think my heart could rearrange itself so easily. Every night he would press a small stuffed bear to his face—he'd told me he missed the stolen voice of his mother. I learned to put him to bed, to laugh at his silly songs, to carry him on my hip.
The work world still hummed. The office gossip came to a boil when York began to show up at our meetings. "Why is he here?" my leader whispered. "He's never here."
"You're new, are you the lucky one?" someone else joked. I flushed and pretended not to notice.
One day York walked into our team room with a stack of wedding invitations and threw them onto the conference table.
"Next week," he said, just like that. "You're all invited."
The roar of whispers drowned my pulse. My leader spluttered. My coworkers stared. I swallowed.
"Is this a joke?" my leader asked, stunned.
"No." York looked at me, a small smile tugging at his mouth. "It's not a joke."
The week moved like lightning. My mother recovered and stood fiercely loyal beside me, though she spat and fussed in her own weathered way. "You got to show them," she told me. "Don't be ashamed of who you are. Use what you have."
The day before the wedding Jacqueline showed up. She arrived like a polished photograph torn at the corners—gorgeous, arrogant, and relentless.
"York," she said, stepping up to him as if there were no room between us. "You promised we'd talk."
"You left," York said slowly. "You left our child."
"Because I had to—" she began, voice slippery with practiced hurt. "I wanted my life. I wanted my future. You were always—"
"Enough," York said. He did not raise his voice, but his jaw tightened. "You came to threaten me."
"You owe me!" she cried. "You owe me the chance to have him. I want him back."
"Colton is not a bargaining chip," York said firmly. "He is our child in the sense that he belongs to love, not to greed."
Her face shifted. "You always had a way with words," she said. "But you owe me more than words."
She pulled out her phone, swiped, and lifted it like a badge. "Text messages. Recordings. He told me to marry him and he gave me gifts. He promised—"
"Stop," York said. "If you want him, you don't step into my life like a thief."
She laughed—cold as glass. "You're married to a poor girl. What is that? He deserves better."
At the wedding banquet, the room swelled with guests: colleagues, family, clients. The huge hall glittered. I stood at York's side, hands sweating. Colton carried flowers like a small emperor. Jacqueline sat at a distant table, a picture of controlled fury.
"Jacqueline," York said when the moment arrived. "You have something to say."
The noise in the room dwindled. "You can't make me a villain," she said, voice bright. "I loved him. I loved what he was."
"You loved what you could take," he answered. "Not the boy. Not the life. Not the truth."
Then York did something I did not expect. He signaled to the head waiter.
"Play it," he told him.
A flat screen flickered at the side of the hall. The video started: it was that afternoon in the mall where Jacqueline had been clinging to York, the same woman who earlier had tried to coax him into remarrying for convenience. The footage was raw. She begged, pleaded, clutched him like an anchor, and then—when the camera showed her phone—messages scrolled, showing her asking for large sums to "let things go," and a recorded voice of her telling a potential buyer that she could "make sure Colton disappears for good" and that she had been "considering legal trouble" to extort money.
The hall inhaled like the sea.
"Is that—" my mother whispered.
"It's truth," York said. "I wanted to keep this private. But when someone comes to my wedding to shake my family down, I will not be quiet."
Jacqueline's face went from smug to pale. "You don't understand—"
"I understand that you threatened me," he said, and he was steady and devastating. "I understand you tried to take our child to leverage assets. I understand you told lies."
She pushed back from the table, eyes blazing. "How dare you! You think you can use a video to ruin me?"
"Do you deny the texts?" he asked.
"I—" She stumbled. "Some are out of context."
"Here are the bank transfers you requested," York said, and a clerk wheeled in a stack of bank statements—her own handwriting on some notes, recorded calls in which she negotiated payment for silence. People craned their necks. My leader from work held his glass halfway to his mouth.
"I will not let my son be used like a coin," York continued. "I will not let people rewrite the past."
"Shut up!" Jacqueline screamed. "You left me. You left me for a life where I had nothing. Now you want to play the martyr."
"And you want to play savior with a phone full of threats," York replied coolly.
It was a public unmasking. The room’s air changed from polite clapping to a harsh, crackling silence. Phones lifted; guests recorded; someone gasped. My mother's hands flew to her mouth.
"You're a liar and a thief," she spat, rising to her feet. "How dare you come to my daughter's wedding to blackmail her and my family?"
Jacqueline staggered, as if she hadn't expected anyone to rise to defend me. For a beat she looked at me—eyes searching for the same betrayal she had inflicted on others—and hatred combusted into panic.
"You can't do this to me—" she sobbed. "I will lose everything!"
"You have already tried to take a child and profit," a woman at the head table said, voice cold. "We will not help you."
"Security!" Jacqueline screamed suddenly, like a Game over screen dragged down. But it was too late. Someone posted the footage already; it started to circulate across the room. Phones pinged.
The public punishment unfolded like a legal thunder. People around her recoiled. A cousin I had never met turned away and muttered, "How could she?" A distant relative clicked a photo. A colleague who had once admired Jacqueline's Instagram feed—now full of sponsored beauty—stood motionless, shocked.
Jacqueline's face lost color. "You don't understand," she kept repeating, flailing. "He promised—"
"Your promises were for yourself," York answered. "You asked money, demanded legal trickery, and threatened a child. That is unforgivable."
She dropped to her knees suddenly, loud and theatrical. "I beg you, York, please. I didn't mean—"
"Don't," he said. "You don't get to beg now."
"You monster," she cried, pulling at her hair. "You were supposed to be my salvation."
"Salvation isn't buying a child back," York said. "It's being present. You left. You write messages to the highest bidder to do harm. You take the name of a child for profit."
Around us the hall divided itself into a thousand reactions.
"I can't believe she would try this," someone whispered.
"She's always been like this," another voice said.
"She used to donate to charity," a guest chimed, confused.
A banker at the next table called out, "If you file slander suits, the board will see the proof."
"I will press for full restitution for emotional damage and legal harassment," York announced.
Jacqueline screamed then, a high keening note that made glasses tremble. She lunged for her purse and tried to storm out, but a group of staff gently but firmly guided her out. She shoved a waitress aside in panic; the room gasped. Cameras continued to film. People whispered into phones and keyed messages. Someone shouted, "Shame on her!"
She stopped at the door, turned, and looked back at me with something like fury and brokenness. "You'll regret this!" she hissed.
"Not a chance," my mother said, voice like gravel. "You lost your chance with both of our hearts."
Outside, Jacqueline confronted the press—demanding to make a statement—but the footage spread too fast. Her PR manager arrived and shoved a hand over her mouth. Men in suits whispered. The humiliation was loud: the scraping of chairs, the flutter of cameras, the low murmur of disgust.
"Apologize!" one of the guests called from the doorway.
Jacqueline collapsed into a chair in the foyer, her thin veil ruined. People stopped to take photos. Some cried. Others muttered about consequences.
The punishment was public, messy, and immediate. She lost prestige in the room where she had intended to assemble support. Her social image—polished, carefully curated over years—crumbled in a live stream of instant evidence. Her attempts to bargain became a story of greed. Her pleas become the soundtrack of a collapse.
She changed from confident to frantic. First she raged, then she denied, then she begged. There was a trace of humiliation—hands over her face, gulping breaths, a voice cracked through tears. People recorded, took photos, posted. The chorus of disapproval was vast. "How could she?" became the room’s chorus.
She tried to stand. People stared. Her makeup ran. She asked someone for help. The same hands that had once applauded her left her. No one offered a chair.
"Please," she whimpered, "I only wanted...I wanted my life back."
"You threw your son away," a relative said in a voice that had no softness left. "You can't just demand him again."
Security gently escorted her out. Photographers followed. The hall's doors closed like a judge's gavel.
I didn't cheer. I felt a hollow. Part of me wanted vengeance; part of me felt pity. But I also felt steel. York did not gloat. He didn't shout. He simply protected the child and the family he had built. That was punishment enough for the woman who thought she could extort a child's life.
After the uproar, the guests returned to their seats in stunned silence. People whispered. The banquet resumed in a quieter sorrow, like waves pulling back after a storm.
Later, Jacqueline would be sued—not just by York, but by sponsors she had deceived. Her social circle would sever ties. Her glossy feeds would get brutally honest comments. For months she read headlines about "blackmail attempt" and "social media downfall." Friends who once sent private praise changed their photos to show solidarity with victims. Sponsors rescinded deals. Her career fractured.
When she stood in a small court room months later—alone and raw—she finally understood consequence. She begged for leniency. No one rushed to defend her. People who had loved her felt betrayed. Her calls to make amends fell flat because she had broken trust with what mattered most: a child's safety.
The public punishment wasn't a spectacle for glee. It was a mirror: the world saw her choices and reacted. She moved from power to pleading. She tried to rebuild later, but the wound in public trust is hard to suture.
That night, after the guests left and the last plate of sweet rice had been cleared, York and I stood under the wisteria outside the hall—the same kind of tree that had been in my childhood memory. Colton slept in a car seat in the back like a small king conquered and secure.
"You did well," my mother told York, surprising me by calling him by his given name. "You protected what matters."
"Thank you," he said, gently. He turned to me. "Will you stay?"
"Yes," I said. "I will."
We opened the wedding gifts later. He had chosen a simple ring that fit my finger like a promise. It wasn't a loud jewel; it was an honest weight.
Later, he kissed me in a way that anchored the future in the present.
"Don't love me the same way you did in secret," he murmured, fingers tracing the wisteria tattoo on my shoulder—the little vine and bloom I had tattooed in youth and hidden for years.
"What if I already do?" I asked.
"Then change the rules," he said, smiling. "Let me love you back."
I laughed and let him, because love takes many forms: safe, awkward, steady, real. We kept our vows, not the ones on paper but the ones in shared small acts: waiting, cooking, sharing duties, stepping in when the other was weak. We were awkward parents—learning and fumbling—but we were together.
One night, years later, when Colton ran ahead to the small wisteria tree in our yard, York and I stood on the porch and watched him. The old tree cast long shadows; its flowers spilled like soft rain.
"Remember when you used to guard that tree?" I asked.
"I remember," York said. He pulled me close and looked at the tattoo hidden beneath my collar. "You were brave to wait."
"I was foolish," I admitted, "and lucky. And you were patient."
"Yes," he said. "Very patient."
Colton turned, waved, and called, "Mom, Dad, look!"
We watched him run, the small figure framed by hanging blossoms. The world felt steady.
"Keep the ring safe," he said, smiling.
"I will, under the wisteria," I replied.
And beneath those purple blossoms, our lives—patched, honest, forgiven—grew into a small, stubborn garden.
The End
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