Chapter 3
I canceled nothing that anyone could trace back to me until eleven days before the wedding. By then, Marcus had every contract restructured so that Ashford Ventures could exercise a full withdrawal clause without penalty, buried in language nobody but a corporate attorney would ever think to read. Priscilla had already lined up a replacement event for that exact date and time, something small and private, something I had asked her to prepare for weeks earlier without telling her why. Grant had pulled every frame of security footage from that fitting room, timestamped, verified, and legally admissible, and had it loaded onto a drive along with six other clips I hadn't told even my attorney about yet, moments from the last year that Vanessa had assumed no one was watching.
The morning of the wedding, Vanessa woke up in a five-thousand-dollar suite at the Larkspur Hotel believing she was hours away from becoming my wife.
I woke up in my mother's guest room, three miles away, watching the sun come up over her tomato garden, calm in a way I hadn't felt in over a year.
At 9 a.m., the florist called Celeste to confirm delivery. There was no delivery, because I had redirected the flowers to a children's hospital in Franklinton two days earlier. At 10:30, the string quartet arrived at an empty cathedral and found Priscilla waiting with a polite explanation and a check for their full fee anyway, because none of this was ever about punishing people who had nothing to do with it.
At 11:45, Vanessa arrived at the cathedral in her gown, veil lifted, hair pinned exactly the way she wanted, walking toward an aisle that held no groom and no guests.
She stopped halfway down that aisle, her heels loud on the stone floor, the silence around her total and absolute. Grant Osei stood near the doors in a dark suit, two other security staff beside him, calm, professional, immovable.
Then the enormous screen I had installed above the altar the night before, the one meant for wedding photo montages, flickered on.
It was the fitting room. Marble floor. Champagne glasses. My mother on the ground, her cane rolling beneath the gown rack. Vanessa's voice, clear and undistorted, filling that entire empty cathedral.
May you like
"Get up and hold my gown. You're here to serve me."
Then Brooke's laugh. Then Celeste's champagne toast to nothing. Then my own voice, quiet and even, the words I had said that day meaning something entirely different now that everyone could finally hear the silence underneath them. "Of course. Let's not ruin the wedding."
