Stigma

Married To My Ex-Fiancé's Silent Uncle

Ming Yue

Twenty minutes before the "Wedding of the Century" at The Plaza, I stood outside the Presidential Suite in a fifty-thousand-dollar Vera Wang gown. I was the girl from a West Virginia trailer park about to marry Hugh Maxwell, the golden heir to a billion-dollar defense empire. I pushed the door open only to find Hugh pinned against the bed with my own stepsister, Floy. She was wearing my bridal diamond necklace, and the sounds of their laughter scraped against my eardrums like sandpaper. I didn't scream; I listened as Hugh grunted that once the wedding was over and the trust fund unlocked, he'd dump "that hillbilly trash" on a bus back to the mountains. They weren't just cheating; they were planning to steal my family's land deeds and leave me with nothing. When I set off the sprinklers and exposed their naked bodies to the paparazzi, the Maxwell family didn't apologize. They called me a "greedy peasant" and threatened to ruin my life unless I signed a new deal to save their crashing stock. I realized then that I was never a bride to them. I was a transaction, a rounding error in a ledger to be used and discarded. They thought my poverty made me weak and my silence made me a victim. "If we don't have a marriage certificate by midnight, the bank freezes thirty percent of our liquidity," their lawyer warned. So, I gave them exactly what they wanted. I used a loophole in their hundred-year-old family covenant and married the only other direct heir available. I didn't marry Hugh. I walked into the ICU and married his uncle, Fleet Maxwell-the legendary war hero who had been in a vegetative state for months. Now, I am the matriarch of the Maxwell dynasty. I've suspended Hugh's executive powers, exiled my mother-in-law to the Swiss Alps, and taken control of the family vault. They think I'm just a gold-digger waiting for a "corpse" to die so I can collect a fifty-million-dollar widow's payout. But last night, as I lay beside my comatose husband, the man they called a vegetable gripped my hand back.

Modern Scheming Contract marriage Billionaires

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< Serena >

Paintings.

I always love them. Whenever there was an art show near Manhattan, I make it a point to go, check the artworks and possibly buy one. Or two. Or three of them.

What I look for in a painting are the strokes the painter uses, the use of colors and how they blend in with the picture in general, and of course, the drawing.

I'm a sucker for fantasy-inspired paintings. Fantastical landscapes, still pictures, mythical creatures, men and women wearing weird clothing, oh yes. I collect them all. They always reach out to a part of my soul that I had been guarding since I lost my parents. They always call out to a part of me that I'm not sure what.

Maybe, my parents as painters could be a reason. They influenced my tastes after all. But deep inside me, I knew there was always something special about these type of paintings that I couldn't quite figure out.

One rainy day, I ran across an antique shop in downtown Manhattan about to be closed by the bank for bankruptcy. The different antique displays were spread all over the street in the hopes that some passers-by would still buy them.

I caught sight of a beautiful painting of a landscape. Breathtaking it was and purely, for lack of a better word, out-of-this-world. The painting showed a mountain range with its slopes covered in autumn trees. In the center of this mountain range, just nestled on top the hill, was a silver castle. The details were extraordinary. Magical even. I couldn't resist its call, so in the end, I bought it. Plus, I didn't want it to be wet with the rain. I wanted to give it a home.

The antique shop owner, an old lady probably in her late sixties, was gracious enough to give me a discount considering the painting had smudges on the edges due to its aged state. I was kind enough to refuse it. If she was in bankruptcy, at least my full payment of the painting would help her in some way.

"May the magic be with you always, " she said with a smile as we parted.

I just shrugged my shoulders never really thinking much of about her words.

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