The Third Wheel Bride Chapter 06
After Caleb left, my life got quiet. Work settled into a rhythm, and I started finding my footing in
Boston.
Some nights, the memories still came, but the pain was gone. There was nothing left but numbness.
Emma hadn’t reached out once. That didn’t surprise me. She was too proud to apologize. She always
had been.
Then I got a call from an unknown number.
“Ms. Moretti?” The voice was gruff and urgent. “This is Marco, Caleb’s head of security. Mr. Costello was ambushed. He’s in the hospital and asking to see you.”
My chest tightened. I went anyway, not for him, but because I couldn’t ignore it.
Caleb was propped up in the hospital bed, his head bandaged, his left arm in a cast. The heir to the Costello fortune had been reduced to this.
“Brianna…” Something flickered in his eyes when he saw me. “You came.”
“What happened?”
His mouth twisted. “Emma’s careless posts exposed my location. A rival crew tracked us, and things got out of hand.”
That was how I found out Emma’s anonymous account had been exposed. Someone had pieced together the locations from her posts and put it on Reddit, and the internet did the rest. People dug through her posts, traced the account, and found everything.
The fallout was immediate.
And because I’d scrubbed my own social media, the story got flipped. To everyone watching, I was the other woman, the one who’d come between their love story.
Emma’s rabid followers doxxed me. The hate messages and threats came flooding in.
“I’m sorry, Brianna.” He could barely look at me. “I didn’t mean for this to drag you into it.”
I looked at him and felt nothing but pity.
“Caleb. Who do you actually love? Me? Emma? Or just yourself?”
He didn’t answer.
We both knew.
Emma showed up not long after, the first time we’d been in the same room since everything fell apart.
She’d lost weight, too much of it. The spark that used to live behind her eyes was gone.
“Brianna.” The rest died in her throat.
I nodded. That was all I had.
“Can we talk?”
We stood there with nothing to say. Twenty years of knowing everything about each other, and now
we were strangers.
“I’m sorry.” Her voice broke first. “I know it doesn’t change anything, but I mean it.”
I looked at her and saw, just for a second, the little girl who’d handed me a lollipop on a sidewalk in
Queens twenty years ago.
“Emma. Do you remember what we promised each other when we were ten?”
Her face crumpled. “I remember. Best friends forever. We swore we’d never let anything come
between us.’
“Forever.” A small, hollow laugh escaped me. “You were the one who broke it, Emma.’
“I never meant for it to happen.” She choked on the rest. “I couldn’t help…”
“Your feelings?”
“Your feelings for Caleb were worth more than twenty years of us?”
She had nothing to say to that.
“The betrayal isn’t even the worst part.” I held her gaze. “It’s that the two of you played me like I
was stupid.”
“While I was picking out flowers and seating charts, you two were in Saint-Tropez.”
“While I trusted you with everything, you were laughing at me behind my back.”
Emma broke down.
“I’m sorry. I know I was wrong. Can we go back to the way we were?”
I held her eyes and slowly shook my head.
“We can’t, Emma. From the moment you hit publish on that first post, there was no going back.”
