Chapter 16 Substituting The Bride

• The drive to the church was a tense one that seemed much longer than usual because of the reason Carol and her parents were headed there. Carol sat stiffly in the backseat with her mother, while her father sat in the front seat beside their remaining driver. They had had to send the other two drivers away more than four months back. It was now everything made sense to Carol. Her parents were in serious debt. Looking at them, however, especially her mother, one would never guess. She was always clad in the latest, most expensive, and most fashionable clothes there were. Carol guessed that every single dime that they managed to get went to supporting her mother’s ridiculously expensive sense of fashion. How dumb and stupid. She was not surprised, though because her mother had always had her father by the balls and it was only whatever she wanted that they did.
• It did not bode down well at all with Carol that they had to resort to using her as a sort of payment for their debt, sacrificing her chance of ever being happy the way they were doing. She did not think she could ever be happy being the wife of that snob that she had known for all of what? Thirty seconds? However, she could not let those bastards kill her uncle for something that he did not know about. Besides, even if they killed her uncle, she had no doubt that they would follow through with their threat to kill off the rest of their family. She only hoped that Mr. James would keep to his word and would help pay off her dad’s debt.
• Out of the corner of her eyes, she saw her mother check her wristwatch for the umpteenth time since they got into the car. She kept doing that as though checking her watch will make the time pass slower, and for some reason, this annoyed Carol to no end.