Chapter 287: The Death-Courting Mother-Daughter Duo (Part 1)
When only Jasmine Faulkner and Faye Sterling came forward, the crowd didn’t pay much mind. But then Aiden Faulkner joined them. She was the hostess—if she was personally going out to greet someone, who could it be? The crowd, their attention now captured by Aiden, was eager to see who was arriving so late and alone to the birthday party. And then they saw Justin Hale walk in!
Most of the guests were around the same age as Aiden Faulkner. Many of them had seen the Hale Family’s heir before, and even those who hadn’t interacted with him personally had heard his name. One could say they had always lived under the glow of Justin Hale’s prestige. Many people had attended this birthday party hoping for a chance to see Justin, or to forge a connection with the Hale Family.
The Faulkner Family alone could never have drawn such a crowd. After all, Aiden Faulkner was Justin Hale’s fiancée. Trying to establish a connection with the Hale Family directly was exceedingly difficult, but going through the Faulkner Family as an intermediary made things much, much easier.
Some people had arrived early and had been subtly probing Aiden, trying to find out when Justin would get there. But Aiden was shrewd; no matter what tricks people tried, they couldn’t get a straight answer out of her about whether Justin would be attending, let alone when he would arrive.
With the party nearly over and Justin still nowhere in sight, the guests had begun to despair. They felt their trip had been for nothing, that they had accomplished nothing. Just as they were thinking of leaving, Justin Hale actually appeared! The crowd instantly swarmed toward him. But the situation was... complicated. ’Isn’t that Aiden Faulkner’s fiancé? Why did he arrive with another woman?!’
’Is he here to celebrate her birthday, or to crash the party?’
Just a moment ago, Aiden Faulkner had been mocking the other girl for attending the party alone, without an escort. Now, her own fiancé had become someone else’s date! What an absolute slap in the face.
They remembered finding the invitations rather odd when they first received them. They’d never heard of a birthday party requiring guests to arrive in pairs. ’Could that rule have been aimed specifically at this girl?’ they wondered. Aiden was so obviously targeting her, and the girl clearly knew Justin too. ’Could it be a love triangle?’
The guests stared, not even blinking. Some, not wanting to be too obvious, averted their gazes, but their ears were pricked, straining to catch every detail of what would happen next.
’The high-society drama of the year!’
’Two women fighting over one man?’
’Is Justin Hale cheating?’
’Is she the other woman?’
The guests proved once again that gossip is a universal human instinct. This kind of drama was exceedingly rare among the wealthy elite. Theirs was a world of arranged marriages, after all—unions they had little to no say in. Most were orchestrated to facilitate cooperation between two families, to bind two otherwise unrelated houses together. Family interests were always paramount.
In relationships like these, unless an outsider was involved, you would never see drama about a third party interfering. There was simply no point. No matter how powerful two individuals might be, they could never be more powerful than two families. Any attempt to interfere would be like an ant trying to shake a tree—utterly futile. These scions of high society were crystal clear about their destinies; they wouldn’t waste their time on something so obviously doomed from the start.
It was far more pragmatic to simply do your own thing after marriage. As long as you didn’t interfere with each other and put on a convincing show of a happy couple in public, everything was fine. That was the smart choice.
This was a truth everyone understood. And that was precisely why seeing Justin Hale walk in with Seraphina Sterling sent their imaginations running wild. It was why they were so utterly astonished.