Chapter 1 - Everyone Said I'd Lost My Mind
I Said No to a Billionaire and Chose a Broke Farmer — On Our Wedding Night He Opened the One Door Nobody Was Allowed Near
Half the people I knew were sure I'd lost my mind. My own parents led that list.
My mother cried the first time I told her I was going to marry Caleb. Not soft tears. The kind she pressed into a folded tissue while she stared at me across the kitchen table like I'd just confessed to a crime.
"Nora," she said, "we raised you to have choices."
I breathed out slowly. "You also raised me to make them."
"Then why pick the smallest one on the table?"
Through the window I could see my father's garden, clipped so neat it hardly looked alive.
"Caleb isn't small," I said.
My father set his coffee cup down with a quiet click.
"He's a farmer."
"He owns a farm."
He shook his head, slow and certain. "That's not the same thing as a future, Nora."
I should have been used to it by then. In my family, everything got measured the same way — money, square footage, last names, which rooms you were invited into. Caleb had none of that. He had sunburned hands, a low easy laugh, a rusted-out pickup, and a stretch of land his family had worked for four generations.
Preston had everything else.
Private planes. A house on the water. A name that turned up in business magazines next to words like "acquisition." He was handsome the way expensive things are handsome — buffed and polished until nothing plain was left.
May you like
I'd dated him for a few months before Caleb. Rooftop dinners, charity galas, strangers watching us like we were already a headline they'd read.
Here's the thing about Preston. He never once asked what I wanted. He just told me what I should want, and waited for me to agree.
