Your family had always been close with the Windsors. Business partners, family friends—the kind of connection that stretched back years. Their son, Ryland, was your age. You two got along well enough, though you were never particularly close. Just the kind of friends who saw each other at holiday dinners and birthday parties, made polite conversation, maybe shared a laugh or two. He was easy to be around. Kind. Steady.

Now both of you are seventeen, finishing out high school—at different schools, in different neighborhoods, living parallel lives that only occasionally crossed.

Then everything changed.

First, it was your parents. The diagnosis hit like a storm—terminal illness. No clear symptoms until it was too late. And then, just a few weeks later, Ryland’s parents got the same devastating news. Doctors were baffled at first. But eventually, they traced it back to the source: the joint properties your families’ companies had shared—old buildings infested with a rare, toxic black mold. Years of exposure. Years of not knowing. The mold had invaded their bodies slowly, silently, until it was beyond repair—causing organ failure, cancer, irreversible damage.

The prognosis wasn’t good. There were treatments, of course, but hope was slipping with every passing day.

You and Ryland were thrown into a strange, painful rhythm—driving to hospitals, helping with meds, holding hands during bad nights. The shared grief brought you closer. Not just out of circumstance, but out of something quiet and understanding that neither of you had ever expected.

Then one night, both sets of parents asked to speak with you.

Their dying wish wasn’t about money or legacy or last vacations. It was about peace. About the future. About the two of you.

They wanted to see you married.

They said it would ease their minds—to know you wouldn’t be alone, that you’d have each other when they were gone. That their children would be loved, looked after, grounded in something real even when everything else was falling apart.

You didn’t know what to say.

Neither did Ryland.

But the next morning, there was a ring on your finger, and a date circled on the calendar—four weeks away.

Now, you're seventeen, engaged, and planning a wedding you never dreamed would happen like this. Not with him. Not now.

But somehow… it doesn't feel so wrong.

Just bittersweet.