He Chose My Best Friend, Now He Wants Me Back Chapter 01

He Chose My Best Friend, Now He Wants Me Back Chapter 01

“I’m sorry, ma’am. Mr. Ben Kline is already married. He can’t apply for a new marriage license.”

The voice of the clerk at the Cook County office was cold, clear, and final.

I froze.

Ben Kline was my fiancé. The man I had loved for eight years.

We were supposed to register our marriage today. The wedding was next month.

There had to be a mistake. “His legal wife…” I asked, my voice trembling. “Who is she?”

The clerk glanced at the screen and read a name that was seared into my memory.

“Sloane Mercer-Kline.”

The floor dropped out from under me.

Sloane was my best friend from college.

After I aged out of the foster system, she was the first person who ever told me she wanted to be my family.

She was supposed to be my maid of honor.

And she was the wife my fiancé had kept hidden for five years.

I stumbled out of the building, the air stolen from my lungs.

Ben and Sloane’s cars pulled up at the same time. They both ran toward me, their faces etched with panic.

Seeing them together, a hundred tiny details I’d ignored suddenly slammed into place.

Ruby, Sloane’s five-year-old daughter, had once let it slip: “Daddy took me to the Museum of Science and Industry this weekend.”

That was the same weekend Ben told me he was stuck at the office, pushing through a major project deadline.

Sloane had cried on my shoulder once, complaining that her husband was always working and never showed his face around her friends.

At the time, I’d held her and felt a pang of sympathy.

Now I saw how absurd it was.

It wasn’t that he never showed his face.

He was with me.

One man. Two homes.

I looked at them, my voice hollow. “You have a five-year-old daughter together, don’t you?”

The color drained from Ben’s face.

…

Sloane took a step forward, tears already streaming down her cheeks. “Mara, let me explain…”

“Explain what?” My voice was flat, a stark contrast to her wracking sobs. “That the marriage records in Illinois are fake? Or that Ruby isn’t his daughter?”

She couldn’t answer. Each word was a nail, pinning her to the spot and pulling the last of my hope out with it.

“This is on me. Be angry with me.” Ben pulled Sloane behind him, shielding her as if I were about to attack her. “Don’t blow this out of proportion. Sloane’s been under a lot of pressure, too.”

I stared at him, a stranger.

In eight years, he had never protected anyone else in front of me. In the past, if I so much as frowned over a bad day at work, he would pull me into his arms and ask, “Who upset you? Tell me. I’ll handle it.”

Now, he was the one who had pushed me into the abyss.

I took a sharp breath, fighting to keep my voice steady. “When?”

Ben’s gaze darted away before he finally answered. Five years ago. Sloane had found out she was pregnant. She was alone in Chicago, no family, her job unstable. So they’d gone to the courthouse and gotten married, just so she and the baby could be on his company’s health insurance.

“It was just a piece of paper, Mara. A document!” he insisted, as if that lessened the betrayal. “I don’t love her. It was about responsibility. My home is here, with you.”

“Home?” The word tasted like ash in my mouth.

His confession played out in my mind. Every weekend, he’d drive to Sloane’s suburban “home,” play with Ruby, and act the part of a perfect husband and father. Then, on Sunday night, he would return to the downtown apartment we shared, shed that skin, and become my “perfect fiancé” again.

He had compartmentalized his life so neatly that I’d never suspected my fiancé was waking up in another woman’s bed.

My memory dragged me back.

To support his struggling startup, I’d given up my spot in the graduate program at Northwestern. We’d crammed ourselves into a tiny, drafty apartment near Lincoln Park. At our lowest point, we split a single slice of pizza. I thought we were fighting for our future, a future that belonged to us.

Now I understood. Every penny I’d scrimped and saved, every hope I’d poured into that future, had been funding another family.

My eyes burned.

Finally, I said one word.

“Fine.”

I turned to leave, but Sloane broke free from Ben, grabbing the hem of my shirt. She was shaking, sobbing so hard she nearly sank to her knees.

“I’m so sorry, Mara. It’s all my fault. Please don’t be like this. You’re scaring me.”

I knew why. When my depression was at its worst, she was the one who stayed by my side, clearing my apartment of anything sharp. She had seen me spiral. She knew what this hollow, silent calm meant.

“I don’t want to lose you,” she choked out, her tears soaking into my jeans. “I can divorce him right now. I’ll take Ruby and leave. I’ll give it all back to you. Everything that should have been yours.”

She looked up at me, her eyes filled with the same earnestness I remembered from college. For a second, she was the girl who had held my hand from a hospital bed and said, “We’re each other’s family.”

But some things can’t be unbroken.

I took a step back, coldly shaking her hand off my arm.

I didn’t say another word. I walked to the curb and hailed a cab.

Chicago blurred past the window. Ben and Sloane shrank in the distance until they disappeared. I didn’t cry. My brain felt like an overheated computer that had forced a shutdown. Every emotion was gone.

When I got back to the apartment—the one filled with all our plans for the “future”—I went straight to the study and opened my laptop.

The screen lit up, reflecting my blank face.

I typed in the bank’s URL from memory and logged into the joint savings account we’d opened for a house.

Sloane said she would give back what was mine.

Ben said our real home was here.

Now, I was about to find out exactly how much of my future they had stolen.