📖 The Story Continues
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Married at First Sight – Episode 03
Summer held a stranger’s smile while Christian’s arm remained firm around her waist. Grandma Norton studied her with delighted suspicion, and Summer realized that one careless sentence had carried her far beyond a harmless favor. Calling herself a future granddaughter-in-law had solved Christian’s immediate problem, but it had created a much larger one for both of them.
“Who are you?” Grandma Norton asked, looking from Summer to her grandson. The question should have been easy, yet Christian hesitated. He had pulled Summer from the sidewalk without knowing so much as her name, and the pause threatened to expose everything.
Summer turned to him with exaggerated affection. “Honey, you didn’t tell Grandma about me?” she asked. Her sweet tone concealed a warning: if he expected her to rescue his lie, he had better keep up. Christian recovered quickly, but amusement flickered in his eyes as if he had not expected his unwilling accomplice to be so capable.
He began an introduction and stalled again. Summer spared him by supplying her own name. “Summer Cale. Nice to meet you.” Grandma Norton repeated it approvingly, apparently unconcerned that her grandson had nearly forgotten the name of the woman he supposedly intended to marry.
Relief transformed the older woman. She announced that she could postpone planning her funeral, prompting Christian to complain that she had nearly given him a heart attack. Summer caught the affection beneath their argument. Whatever his reasons for avoiding marriage, he genuinely loved the formidable woman manipulating him toward it.
Grandma Norton’s attention returned to Summer with unnerving speed. She asked whether the two of them were getting married. Christian answered yes at once, and Summer echoed him because hesitation would ruin the act. Their agreement sounded convincing enough to satisfy anyone—except perhaps the two people making it.
“Today,” Grandma Norton declared. The word stripped the humor from the situation. Summer turned toward Christian, expecting him to invent an excuse, but his grandmother was already celebrating. Faced with her radiant relief and Christian’s silent plea, Summer heard herself agree to a wedding that had not existed minutes earlier.
The hours that followed blurred into signatures, official forms, and decisions made too quickly to feel real. By the time Summer held the marriage certificate, there had been no romantic proposal, no white dress, and no exchange of heartfelt promises. There was only ink on paper confirming that Summer Cale and Christian Norton Jr. were legally bound.
Her former life had ended in a café that morning, and an entirely new one had begun before she could grieve it. Summer studied the certificate, half expecting the names to rearrange themselves into something sensible. They did not. She had married a stranger on the same day she confronted the man she once expected to marry.
When they were finally alone, she turned to Christian with a brittle smile. “Mr. Norton, now that we’re married, do you know any good divorce lawyers?” The question was absurd, but it grounded her. A divorce meant there was still an exit from the madness.
Christian thanked her, testing her name as though committing it to memory. He admitted that he needed the performance to continue because his grandmother would watch them closely. Summer had already guessed that Grandma Norton would not accept a marriage certificate and then politely disappear from their lives, but hearing it confirmed made the arrangement feel alarmingly permanent.
Christian produced a bank card and offered it as compensation for her trouble. The passcode, he explained, was six zeros. Summer stared at the card without reaching for it. After Nancy’s humiliating display of money, another wealthy stranger attempting to pay her left a bitter taste, even if Christian’s offer held no obvious malice.
She had not asked to be rewarded. She had acted on impulse, perhaps because rescuing Christian from his grandmother felt easier than confronting the wreckage Vincent had left behind. Accepting money could turn their ridiculous marriage into a cold transaction, yet refusing it would not erase the legal bond already linking them.
Christian continued before she could decide. If Summer moved in with him, he said, their marriage would appear far more convincing. “Wait, what?” she demanded. Pretending in public was one thing; sharing a home with a man she had met on the street was another.
He asked whether she had a boyfriend. The question reopened a wound she had barely managed to cover. “Not anymore,” Summer said. Vincent was dead to her, even if anger was the only thing keeping grief from swallowing her whole.
“Great,” Christian replied with unmistakable enthusiasm, then corrected himself too late. Summer narrowed her eyes. His satisfaction made little sense if this were merely an arrangement, and for the first time she wondered why he had chosen her so readily when a man with his confidence could surely find countless willing women.
Before she could question him, Christian announced that he had to leave. He promised they would talk later, behaving as though arranging the details of a spontaneous marriage were no more complicated than scheduling lunch. His composure made Summer painfully aware of how little she knew about him.
He stepped away, then looked back with an easy smile. “Wife.” The word followed her like a touch, strangely intimate despite everything artificial about their relationship. Summer hated that it made her pulse stumble.
She called after him, demanding to know when they were supposed to get divorced. Christian either did not hear or chose not to answer. Within seconds, he disappeared into the waiting city, leaving her with a bank card, a marriage certificate, and far more questions than she had possessed that morning.
Summer looked down at the name beside hers on the certificate: Christian Norton Jr. She knew nothing about her new husband beyond his devotion to his grandmother and his talent for turning emergencies into agreements. Somewhere beneath the shock, an uneasy thought took root—perhaps Christian had left the divorce date unanswered because he had no intention of choosing one.
