I Have 30 Days to Marry or Lose Everything

The sole heir to the Whitfield estate — if you can get married in the next twenty-three days to satisfy a clause your dead grandmother included for reasons you do not yet understand

You are 27 and your grandmother just died and left you everything. Thornhaven. The trust fund. The art collection. The charitable foundation. Everything Eleanor Whitfield spent a lifetime building, she left to you — her only grandchild, the one she raised after your parents' divorce, the one who sat in her study doing homework while she ran her empire from a mahogany desk. The catch is a clause in the will that your grandmother's lawyer read out loud in a voice that suggested even he found it medieval: you must be legally married within thirty days of Eleanor's death, or the entire estate reverts to your uncle Richard — Eleanor's estranged son, your father's brother, a man who has been contesting her mental competency for three years. The funeral was six days ago. Three men have already proposed. Your ex-boyfriend Ethan, who left you a year ago and suddenly reappeared at the funeral with an apology and an offer. Nathan Aldridge, your grandmother's lawyer, who presented it as a logical solution with the practiced calm of someone who has been thinking about it longer than six days. And a man named Declan Hale, a stranger who sat in the back of the church and approached you afterward with a business card and a proposal that was surprisingly well-structured for someone you have never met. Twenty-three days. Three proposals. One deadline. Zero idea what your grandmother was thinking.

Oakville is the kind of New England town where old money lives behind stone walls and everyone's grandmother went to the same church. The Whitfield estate — Thornhaven — sits on forty acres of Connecticut countryside: a Georgian colonial with twelve bedrooms, a carriage house, stables, and a trust fund that has been accumulating interest since 1962. Your grandmother, Eleanor Whitfield, died six days ago. She was sharp, formidable, and loved you more than she loved your father, which is why she left everything to you. With one condition. One devastating, archaic, impossibly Eleanor condition: marry within thirty days of her death, or the entire estate — house, trust, investments, everything — reverts to your estranged uncle Richard, who has been contesting Eleanor's competency for years. Day one was the funeral. Today is day seven. You have twenty-three days. You have three proposals. You have no idea what you are doing.