Sweet Romance10 min read
Two Masks, One Marriage — How I Sold Fish and He Sold Gold
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I signed the marriage license and slammed it onto my father's trembling hands.
"Look," I said, and forced the laugh out of my throat, "I'm married now."
My father, Amos Munoz, held the paper like it was a talisman. "My daughter," he whispered, voice breaking. "I'll go prepare the dowry."
"Dowry?" I tried to smile. "Dad, I want to open a company."
"You already have a head for business," he said, eyes wet. "Keep your value under wraps. Watch him. If he only wants money, get away. Understand?"
"I understand." I lied better than I ever had.
That night, the stairwell in his building groaned like an old ship. The light flickered. A smell—sour sweat, concrete dust—hit me as soon as I turned the key.
He stepped out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel, hair dripping, shoulders wide as a hull. The sweat still clung to him like the smell of summer labor. He looked like someone who would tear up a street with a sledgehammer and laugh about it afterward.
"You're back?" he said.
"Yes." I set my fish basket down on the table, the little plastic net thrumming faintly. "You worked hard. Let me cook."
"Thank you." He took the offered food, voice soft. "We're married. Don't be so formal."
"Call me Elyse," I said, automatically. "Call me whatever you want," he said, and the word "wife" slipped into the space between us like a dare.
He was Pedro O'Brien. He told me he moved bricks for a living.
"Here," he said once, pressing a small stack of cash into my palm. "That's this month's pay."
I counted: five thousand. A laugh wanted to come out, but I smoothed it down. "Keep it. Buy a shirt," I said. I handed him one thousand back. He blinked.
"Why?" he asked.
"You'll need it," I said, and he smiled the way someone smiles when they believe they can build a small, honest life out of nothing.
We kept our odd life. He came home smelling of sweat. I came home smelling of fish. We ate what we could afford. We told each other small lies that comforted us: I was a fish-seller; he was a bricklayer.
"Do you ever tell me the whole truth?" he asked once, rummaging for a bandage with the same careful fingers he used to pick up heavy things.
"Do you?" I shot back.
He looked at me, and for a second I felt like a girl again, like the world could be figured out if you only looked at the seams.
"Maybe," he said. "Maybe some truths are scared of light."
The world, however, had other plans. A dinner invitation dragged us both into a ballroom with gilt frames and lamps like moons. There I saw him in a suit the color of storm clouds, his shoulders cut like a promise. I saw the watch on his wrist and the way people turned to look when he passed.
"Pedro?" I whispered, fingers around my glass.
"Elyse." He smiled that turtle-smile that was suddenly all teeth and promises.
We both lied a second time that night, only now our costumes were more expensive.
"Who are you with?" a woman asked me, breath like perfume. "I thought I saw you in the market."
"He helps me with deliveries sometimes," I said.
Pedro's eyes narrowed, but he let the lie pass like a stranger through an open gate.
Later, the hotel lobby smelled of citrus and old money. We left by different doors because I thought a secret marriage could be prouder if its participants kept performing poverty.
We told our small illusions to friends. I called my assistant.
"Ivanna, bring me a cheap bike outfit," I said. "Make it smell like fish."
Ivanna Xiao clicked her tongue. "You told me you'd never do something so... raw."
"I promised Pedro I was a fish-seller," I said. "I'll prove it."
She laughed. "You're insane. But okay, crazy boss, yes ma'am."
At the worksite where Pedro said he labored, the sun baked everything into colors of rust. He stood by machines, helmet on, giving a hundred orders. Sweat ran into his collar and the men around him obeyed like ships in a storm.
"Pedro!" I called, trying to sound like the girl who swept floors and wrapped fish. He turned, and his face folded into a kind of gentle bewilderment. "What are you doing here?"
"This is my day," he said. "It always was." He waved a hand, and the men closed ranks again, and I felt small and proud and dizzy.
"You're lying," I said later, whispering like a child. "You don't need to be here."
He shrugged. "Maybe I do. Maybe I like calling things by their names."
We were both lying because we were both trying to answer a question we couldn't ask: How do you know someone loves you if they don't know what you own?
When my father's name for me—a future CEO of a fish empire—arrived like a cruel horoscope, he asked one strange favor: attend the auction at the Caesar Hotel and bid for a painting. "If you can get it," he said, "I'll know you're serious."
"Of course," I said. "I'll get it myself."
And I thought I would.
The auction room was a cathedral of soft lights and polite breathing. People like chandeliers dotted the room—aristocrats, collectors, predators. At the front was an old scroll painting, the Autumn Water, that everyone wanted like a tide wants sand.
"Opening bid five million," the auctioneer sang.
"Ten!" a man across the aisle snapped.
"Twenty!" said the slim woman at my left—Blakely Gauthier. Her smile was a blade disguised as cake.
"Two hundred," I mouthed in my head, then out loud, "Eighty million."
"One hundred," Blakely purred. "One hundred and fifty."
"Two hundred," I said. My throat dried.
"I don't have two hundred," Ivanna hissed in my ear, eyes wide, hands shaking like leaves.
"Make it two hundred fifty," Blakely said, arrogantly. "Wouldn't you rather put that money into a real collection instead of—" She gestured at my chain purse as if it were a crime scene.
"Two hundred million," Pedro said, voice quiet.
The room spun. People looked up. I looked at Pedro. He held his bid paddle like a man who'd just lit a candle under truth.
"Two hundred million twice," the auctioneer repeated. "Sold."
I think I fell and didn't realize.
"Pedro," I breathed, angry and stunned all at once. "What the hell did you just do?"
He looked amused, and the amusement stung worse than any insult. "I did what I should have done before. I put my money where my mouth is."
Blakely stared. Her smile turned brittle. "You—" she threw a hand up as though slapping me across the face for my impertinence. "You can't afford that. Who are you?"
"I'm Pedro O'Brien," he said. The name sat there with a kind of slow heat. "People who work hard can save. People who work hard can win elegant things. Some of us do both."
"Are you serious?" Blakely said, voice high. "You came here to show off? To crush people in a room? That's vulgar."
"He bought the painting," said a journalist at the edge of the crowd, pen lifted. "Pedro O'Brien, the new owner of Autumn Water. Pedro—are you the Pedro O'Brien who works construction?"
He smiled. The flash of his teeth in the light was like a small sunrise. "I work," he said. "What anyone else does with their time is their business."
Blakely tried to retort, tried to spin a rumor about how Pedro had leased a short-term account or borrowed money from a backer. But the cameras were already on him. The flashbulbs loved him. People clapped. The room shuddered with gossip and the scent of freshly spilled status.
Blakely left that night with red cheeks and a rumor like a lead cloak over her shoulders. In the car afterward, I wanted to march up to her and tear off whatever mask she had. Instead, Pedro slid his hand into mine and said, "Let's go home."
We were raw and honest with each other after that.
"Why didn't you tell me?" I asked, the next morning, the bed sheets still warm.
He shrugged. "I wanted you to love me for me. Not for a bank balance."
"Did you want me to love you for your sledgehammer?" I jabbed.
He laughed. "Maybe the sledgehammer's a good conversation starter."
Days unrolled into a strange and sweet rhythm. We wore our poverty when it suited us; we wore our wealth when it suited us. We learned each other's corners. He took my hand in meetings and listened. I sat with him at his "construction office" and tried not to laugh when he made coffee orders in a voice that meant business.
But not everyone's mask fell so easily. Blakely Gauthier was wounded pride made visible. She had been publicly bested by a man she deemed beneath her, and she decided she would not let it go.
A week after the auction, at a charity gala where silks melted into champagne, Blakely arranged a spectacle.
They called it the Reveal.
She rented a stage, bought a microphone, and invited the whole city to see the woman who had been "exposed" by a supposed bricklayer. The hall swelled with cameras. People sat with their forks like they were battle flags.
She took the microphone like a queen entering battle. "Ladies and gentlemen," she sang, "let us speak of truth."
The audience leaned in.
Blakely's plan was simple. She had fabricated documents—invoice stubs with forged signatures, a fake banker who would "confirm" Pedro's account was empty, rumors about some shadow loan. She wanted the city to believe she had been the target of a set-up—that Pedro had bought the painting with laundered money or borrowed credit that would collapse like a house of cards. She would neuter him with scandal and regain her throne of prestige.
She began, smooth as lacquer. "Last week, a man in a hard hat made a spectacle at an auction. I watched him spend what a family could live on for years. I smelled theatrics. I smelled deception."
There was a murmur.
I could have left the gala. I could have ducked into the kitchen where Ivanna stood with her back like a shield. Instead, I went on stage.
"Blakely," I said, voice small but steadier than I felt, "why do you want to humiliate him?"
She blanched, but only for a second. "Because he made a mockery of us." Her voice found its old venom. "Because he showed off wealth he doesn't own."
Pedro stepped into the light beside me, corners of his mouth softening. "You want proof?" he asked.
Blakely snapped her fingers and a man in a suit came forward, a so-called "expert" who was supposed to confirm her tale. He held an envelope thick with paper. "This," he said, "is ledger records."
Pedro smiled at him like one man might smile at a kitten trying to be a tiger. "Please, show us."
The man's hands trembled as he read. He stumbled through listing numbers that were supposed to end in scandal; they ended instead in names—charities, contractors, receipts paid to hospitals, invoices for machine parts, philanthropic contributions, mortgage payments. The ledger was not crooked. It was generous. It was precise. It told a story of a man who had spent money with the steadiness of a craftsman investing in a city.
Blakely's face changed. Her mask fell and revealed something thin and brittle underneath. The crowd began to shift; whispers turned into laughter, laughter into a ripple of outrage.
"Wait," Blakely stammered. "That can't be—"
"That is the truth," Pedro said. "And let's show another truth." He waved and a woman from the hospital in the ledger stepped forward. "You—" she said, voice shaking with gratitude, "you donated to my son's surgery. You saved his life."
The crowd's attitude fractured like glass. Some people gasped; others took out phones and filmed. Cameras zoomed. People who had been leaning in now leapt to their feet.
Blakely tried to regain command. "Evidence can be fabricated—"
"It can," Pedro agreed. "And so can reputations. But not tonight." He motioned gently, and a projection lit the wall with a list of payments that matched his handwriting and signatures—checks and transfers from his real accounts, receipts, confirmation emails. The forgeries evaporated under light.
Blakely's voice shrank. She tried a new angle: "You buy sympathy! You stage donations!"
"Ask the mother then," Pedro said quietly. "Ask her if it was staged."
She was already shaking. People began to look at her not as an aristocrat but as a woman who had tried to steal brightness from others to shine. Phones recorded her fingers as they touched the microphone; cameras recorded the expression that passed over her face—first anger, then denial, then humiliation like winter air across a bare field.
A small boy in the audience—one of the children whose surgery had been paid for—pointed at her. "She lied about me," he said simply. The statement landed like a stone and created concentric circles.
"What do you say?" Pedro asked, not unkindly.
Blakely's mouth moved without sound. The room that had once hung on her inflections now hung instead on the proof against her. People rose. Some applauded Pedro. Others whispered to their neighbors, trading lucky words: "I thought so." "She always seemed—" "What a show."
Around her, allies melted away. The "expert" who had brought the ledger for Blakely took a step back, eyes down. Guests shifted their chairs to create distance. A woman who had once thrown her arm around Blakely's shoulder now avoided her glance like one avoids a puddle.
By the time Blakely left the stage, she was alone. A few young men made a show of offering her a hand; she slapped them away. Cameras followed her as she fled the hall. Reports would follow for days, and not in her favor: articles about arrogance and small cruelties, threads about fabricated evidence, gossip columns comparing her fall to Icarus.
Pedro and I stood together. "You didn't have to do that," I said when the noise had thundered down to a hum.
"I didn't," he admitted. "But someone who lies for sport should see what truth looks like." He looked at me, and there was no triumph in that look—only tired resolve. "I don't like being lied about. I don't like people thinking they can take people with money and toss them away like trash."
The crowd outside the hall had thinned into gossip and the night. But in those few hours, Blakely had been stripped of the costume that made her a social queen. The punishment was public. It was raking, raw, and quick like a winter wind. She went home to a suite that suddenly felt like a cell.
I did not gloat. I felt the strange hush of seeing a person used to power crumble. It made the taste of victory hollow in my mouth.
Days after, we went through the ritual of real lives: paperwork, apologies, company memos. I told my father the truth about the painting. He laughed until he cried.
"You two fools," he said, and his voice shook with happiness. "You hid from each other like small animals. But I like the results."
"How did you know?" I asked.
"I guessed," he said. "And because I knew you needed to prove yourselves your own people."
Pedro and I rebuilt trust. We told each other our weak stories—a lover left him for someone flashy; I had lied to test whether a man loved me, and the test had become its own trap.
"Let's be honest now," he said one night as we sat on the edge of our balcony, the city the color of small fireflies below. "No more costumes."
"No more costumes," I repeated.
Time unfurled. We moved into one of his houses properly, and I started the company I had always promised myself. He still went to his sites sometimes, not because he had to, but because that was where the pulse was. I traveled to markets with him, and he breathed like salt and nets and the sea, and my breath met his like two tides.
Years later, when our twins—one loud boy and a polite, inquisitive girl—came into our life, we taught them a strange rule.
"Truth is heavy," I would joke with Pedro. "But it's better than carrying two lives at once."
One autumn afternoon, the boy came home from kindergarten and marched into our living room, face grave.
"Mom, Dad," he said. "If you lie, you must have to swallow a thousand pins."
Pedro and I looked at each other and then at him, and we laughed until the sound shook the windows.
"Not pins," Pedro said, scooping him up. "Just tell the truth, and we'll skip the needles."
We had both learned the lesson the hard way: love held no interest in wallets. It cared for hands, for mornings shared, for the small, honest acts. It lived in the way a man swapped suits for helmets and a woman swapped heels for oil-stained boots. It lived in the auctions not for art but for truth.
And once, when the twins were asleep, I found Pedro in the kitchen with the shrimp basket and a cheap knife, peeling like a man who had loved two lives and chosen one.
"I still smell like the market," he said, smiling.
"And I still smell like fish," I answered. "But you smell like home."
He kissed my forehead. "We built a home on two lies," he said. "Now we can build a future on truth."
"Deal," I said.
And we did.
The End
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