The wine glass trembled in Sarah Chen's hand as she stared out the window of her luxury penthouse apartment. Behind her, her phone buzzed insistently against the marble counter, each vibration a reminder of the messages she couldn't bring herself to read. She knew what they would say. They always said the same thing.
"Remember, Sarah, marriage is about compromise and saving face. The Chen family name carries weight."
Her mother's words from her wedding day four years ago echoed in her mind, bitter as the room-temperature wine she now forced herself to swallow. The same deep red as Rebecca's dress at last week's charity gala. Sarah's stomach churned at the memory, her fingers tightening around the stem of her glass until her knuckles turned white.
At twenty-five, she was about to become everything her traditional Asian family feared and detested, a brazen and scandalous figure, a bearer of shame, and a breaker of homes. But the true breaking had happened long ago, in the quiet moments between corporate smiles and hollow pleasantries, in the suffocating silence of perfectly arranged dinner parties where everyone played their assigned roles to perfection. Sarah could not help but chuckle to herself as she remembered the details.
The penthouse which had been her family's lavish wedding gift moved from a place that provided her safety, clarity and a symbol of success into a gilded cage. Soon it would be just another asset to divide, another item on the divorce papers she planned to file. The thought should have terrified her. Instead, she felt only a peculiar sense of calm, as if she had finally surfaced after years of drowning in expectations.
Sarah was no stranger to the concept of arranged marriage, her mother as well as her grandmother had been the first impression of the concept to her as they never failed to admit that the union they had with her father and grandfather had been arranged by family and it was never about love.
How had she arrived at this moment? The path seemed both inevitable and impossible. Marcus had appeared perfect on paper: Harvard-educated, well-connected, the eldest son of another banking dynasty. They had grown up together and shared confidences, dreams, as well as ambitions.
If anyone could understand her desire to break free from the suffocating weight of tradition, it should have been him. Their childhood friendship had seemed like a foundation strong enough to build a life upon, even within the constraints of their families' expectations.
They weren't strangers to arranged marriages. Sarah had watched her mother and grandmother navigate their own carefully orchestrated unions, had witnessed the businesslike exchanges that passed for intimacy at their family meals.
Conversations that revolved around company performance and family image, never love, never joy, never the messy reality of genuine human connection. Every interaction seemed choreographed, every emotion carefully contained within the boundaries of propriety.
Her grandmother had once pulled her aside at a family gathering, her wrinkled hands clasping Sarah's with surprising strength. "This is how we survive," she had whispered, her eyes sharp with decades of accumulated wisdom. "This is how we maintain our place." But Sarah had seen the price of that survival in the tight lines around her grandmother's mouth, in the careful way her mother measured every word before speaking.
The Chen family name had always been both her shield and her shackles. As one of Detroit's most prominent banking families, they had expectations to maintain, traditions to uphold, appearances to preserve, no matter which country they found themselves in. Sarah had thought her marriage to Marcus would be her escape, a way to claim some measure of control over her own destiny. Their shared history had seemed like a secret advantage, a chance to build something genuine within the framework of their families' expectations.
She had been so young, so naive. The early marriage had raised eyebrows among their social circle, but those who knew the truth understood it as an act of rebellion disguised as compliance. Her friends had congratulated her on her cleverness, on finding a way to take power away from her parents while seemingly playing by their rules. Marcus had smiled that reassuring smile of his, had promised to be her partner in this delicate dance of tradition and modernity.
But somewhere along the way, the dance had fallen out of step. The childhood friend who had once shared her dreams of breaking free had transformed into someone else entirely – someone who found comfort in the very conventions they had once mocked together. Or perhaps he had always been that person, and she had simply seen what she wanted to see.
Her phone buzzed again, more urgent this time. They didn't understand boundaries, these people who claimed to care about her future. It was always about their desires, their vision, their need to maintain the careful facade of perfection. Each message was another brick in the wall they had built around her, another thread in the web of obligations and expectations that had nearly succeeded in trapping her completely.
Sarah took another sip of wine and made her decision. This was it – her moment to choose sanity over tradition, truth over appearances, herself over the weight of the Chen family name. The messages could wait. The lies could not. She had spent too long trying to breathe underwater, too long pretending that duty could substitute for happiness.
Her gaze drifted to the city lights below, each one a star in an urban constellation that seemed to promise freedom. The same view she had once shared with Rebecca at that fateful gala, before everything changed. Before the truth became impossible to ignore.