I didn’t cry.
My hand stopped trembling completely.
I stood up, walked into the bedroom, and unzipped the dress bag.
The white silk hung heavy and absurd.
I took it off the door and laid it on the bed.
Then I took the scissors from my desk and cut the veil in half.
Not out of rage. Out of clarity.
I would wear the dress tomorrow. Not as a bride.
As evidence that I had believed them, and as proof that I no longer did.
The chapel by the water was perfect.
That was the worst part.
Late September light poured through the glass walls and made the lake look like hammered silver. White chairs, white flowers, the string quartet Lucas had hired playing something soft and expensive. Two hundred people murmuring, turning, smiling.
Vivian sat in the front row in pale blue, dabbing her eyes before anything had even happened, playing the mother of the groom so well I almost doubted what I’d heard.
Lucas stood by the altar with a clipboard, checking his watch, whispering into his headset. Efficient. Calm. The man who had described how my body would be found.
And Adrian waited at the end of the aisle in a charcoal suit, his hair exactly the way I liked it, his face open and shining when he saw me appear in the doorway.
He mouthed, “You look beautiful.”
For a second my body remembered three years of loving him. My feet wanted to move toward him. My mouth wanted to smile.
Then Judge Morales stepped forward.
She was a woman in her sixties who had sworn me in when I passed the bar. She had agreed to officiate as a favor. Now she looked at me and gave the smallest, almost invisible nod.
Daniel stood two rows back on my side, in a suit, hands clasped in front of him. Beside him, my best friend Sarah, who I had called at 4 a.m. and who had arrived with no questions and a thermos of coffee and had helped me tape the small, flat speaker to the inside of my bouquet.
The quartet stopped.
Every head turned.
I walked.
Not slowly like a bride. Not hesitantly. At a normal, steady pace, bouquet in both hands, eyes straight ahead.
Adrian held out his hand for me.
I didn’t take it.
I stopped three feet away from him. Close enough that he could see my face clearly. Close enough that the microphone clipped to Judge Morales’s robe could pick up everything.
“Emily?” he said, smiling, but his smile flickered when I didn’t smile back. “Hey.”
Vivian leaned forward, her hand on her chest.
Judge Morales looked at me.
