Married to the Wrong Brother.
NOVEL STATUS: COMPLETED
PUBLISHED CHAPTERS: 14 CHAPTERS
Married to the Wrong Brother – Sneak Peek
The pregnancy test was still warm between my fingers when Bridget’s message hit my phone like a slap.
“Freya, come quick! They’ve destroyed your entire room!”
I stared at the screen. Read it again. The two pink lines on the test blurred for a second, and then my legs were moving before my brain caught up — out of the hospital corridor, past the reception desk where a nurse called after me, and into the street where the afternoon light felt obscenely cheerful for what was happening.
I ran. Not gracefully, not like women run in movies — I ran clutching a pregnancy test in one hand and my phone in the other, my bag slamming against my hip, my breath coming in ugly gasps.
By the time I reached the house, I could hear them before I could see them. A chorus of righteous fury, the kind that only exists when people are absolutely certain they’re on the right side of something. As I climbed the stairs, a smell hit me — something foul and chemical, like dirty water mixed with cleaning products — and my stomach, already fragile from the pregnancy, lurched.
“Pour all that dirty water on the bed! Maybe that’ll teach her not to be such a homewrecker!”
I stopped on the landing. Listened.
“A shameless boyfriend stealer! I considered her my best friend, and she repaid me by seducing my boyfriend.”
Phoebe Sinclair’s voice. I’d know it anywhere — that particular pitch she hit when she wanted an audience to feel sorry for her. I’d heard it directed at professors, at baristas who got her order wrong, at anyone who stood between Phoebe and what she wanted. But never at me. Not until now.
I peered through the cracked door. There she was, hands on her hips, orchestrating the destruction like a furious conductor. Three of her friends — girls I vaguely recognized from campus — were tearing through my belongings with the enthusiasm of people who’d been given permission to be terrible.
Then Phoebe’s posture shifted. One second, rage. The next, she was crying — the sudden, photogenic kind of crying that left her mascara perfectly intact — and I noticed the phone propped on my desk, camera facing her. She was streaming.
“My boyfriend is a deacon at St. Albans on the Hill,” she sobbed, each word measured for the audience. “I supported him for three years until he left his vocation for me. But my so-called friend, Freya…” She paused. Let the silence do its work. “That shameless woman always paraded around in tiny crop tops and skirts that barely covered her indecency whenever my boyfriend came to pick me up. And she’d look at him with puppy dog eyes! She used dirty tricks to get pregnant with his baby…”
One of the girls stopped mid-destruction to chime in. “Phoebe is too good. As her friends, we must protect her love!”
𝗗і𝗌𝗰ov𝗲𝘳 𝗇𝗲𝘸 𝘴t𝗈ri𝗲s 𝗼𝗻 𝗀a𝘭𝘯о𝘷𝘦𝘭𝗌.𝗰𝘰𝘮
“Yes! Protect the beautiful love between the deacon of Aldwick and the campus queen!”
“Protect their love!” they chanted, raising imaginary banners of justice while continuing to rip apart everything I owned.
My phone buzzed again. A link this time. I tapped it, and the livestream loaded: “Homewrecker Seduces Aldwick Deacon, Legitimate Wife Discovers Her and Forces Abortion.” My photo sat at the top — black-and-white, grainy, chosen to make me look as guilty as possible.
The comments were already pouring in. Hundreds of strangers calling me things I’d never repeat, certain of my guilt based on nothing but Phoebe’s tears and a flattering camera angle.
I kicked the door open.
It swung hard enough to bounce off the wall, and the room went quiet — that specific silence that falls when people realize the person they’ve been talking about is standing right there. It lasted exactly two seconds.
“Well, well. The boyfriend stealer has returned.”
“If I were you, I would’ve died of shame before coming back.”
Phoebe wiped tears that weren’t there, angled her face toward the camera — showing her most vulnerable profile, chin slightly trembling — and said, “Freya, I understand that as my friend, you’re jealous that I did better than you and landed a handsome, rich boyfriend like the deacon, but that doesn’t justify you getting into his bed…”
Her boyfriend. Something about the way she said it, so certain, so territorial. I searched my memory and came up blank.
“Who exactly is your boyfriend?”
-Continue in Married to the Wrong Brother chapter 1 –
