At the wedding ceremony, just as I was about to formally greet Alexander York’s parents as my new in-laws, his lifelong best friend climbed onto the stage, dropped into the chair beside his father, and smiled at me as if she were the bride and I were merely late to her party.
Chapter 2
By the time I reached the penthouse, the wedding reception was continuing without me.
Videos appeared in the family group chat.
Alexander’s parents stood onstage apologizing for my “pre-wedding stress.” Casey drank whiskey beside Alexander and announced that she had to “protect her boy” now that his bride had abandoned him.
She sat in my chair.
She drank from my champagne glass.
When the wedding coordinator awkwardly announced the cake cutting, Casey went onstage, wrapped herself behind Alexander, and guided his hand over the knife.
Then she smeared frosting across his face.
Alexander stared at her for one second.
Then he smeared it back.
They chased each other around the cake laughing.
She slipped.
He caught her around the waist.
Everyone applauded.
Thirty minutes later, Casey posted a photograph online.
Bride went on strike. Best man saved the wedding.
Mutual friends filled the comments with jokes.
You two have more chemistry than the married couple.
Alexander responded beneath them.
Lucy is throwing a tantrum. Stop making it weird.
I stared at those words for a long time.
Then an email notification appeared.
Three weeks earlier, the Geneva Institute for Plant Medicine had offered me a three-year research appointment studying regenerative compounds derived from alpine flora. It came with laboratory funding and a permanent position afterward.
I had declined.
Alexander said three years abroad would be unfair to our marriage.
I reopened the email.
My fingers did not shake when I typed.
If the position remains available, I would like to accept.
The response came twenty minutes later.
Welcome aboard, Dr. Walker.
Then I called my attorney.
“Prepare divorce papers.”
“What terms?”
“I don’t want the penthouse, company shares, support, or family property. Nothing.”
“Lucille, you may be entitled to a considerable settlement.”
“I know.”
“You’re giving up millions.”
“I’m buying freedom.”
The front door opened.
Alexander entered.
Casey came with him.
She kicked off her shoes and slipped her feet into the brand-new house slippers I had bought for myself.
“Hey, Lucy,” she said. “Mind if I shower? I smell like a liquor cabinet.”
She did not wait for permission.
Ten minutes later, she walked out of our master bathroom wearing one of my towels.
Then she sat on the couch and stretched her bare legs across Alexander’s lap.
The wedding photographer had sent the first batch of pictures to our tablet.
Casey began swiping.
“Keep.”
A photograph of her clinking glasses with him.
“Keep.”
Her arms around him during the cake cutting.
“Definitely keep.”
Then a picture of me appeared.
I stood alone at the altar, my eyes red beneath my veil.
Casey deleted it.
Alexander watched.
Another appeared of me removing the veil.
Delete.
Another of my mother’s lace dragging beneath Casey’s shoe.
Delete.
I reached for the tablet.
Alexander intercepted me.
“She’s right,” he said. “Why keep photographs that remind us how badly today went?”
I stopped.
Out of forty images, Casey removed nearly every clear picture of me.
Then she placed the tablet on the table.
“There. Much better.”
I went into the bedroom and booked a one-way flight for three days later.
The following evening, Alexander dropped a new honeymoon itinerary on the coffee table.
My name had been replaced.
CASEY CLARK.
“When you’re ready to apologize,” he said, “I’ll put your name back.”
Casey was sitting on the floor packing diving equipment.
“Oh, hurry up and apologize,” she said. “I don’t want to share a honeymoon suite with this idiot.”
Alexander smiled.
They both believed I would surrender.
I always had before.
The next morning, I drove to the cemetery.
Alexander had promised to come.
Before Mom died, she had cried because she would never see me walk down the aisle. Alexander once held her hand in the hospital and promised that after the wedding, we would visit her grave together with flowers and tell her everything had turned out beautifully.
I waited until noon.
Then his message arrived.
Casey has a competition today. Her car broke down. I’m driving her. We can visit your mom anytime.
Anytime.
I carried the flowers up the hill alone.
I cleaned the dirt from Mom’s headstone and sat beside it.
“Hi, Mom.”
My voice broke.
“The wedding didn’t go very well.”
I laughed through tears.
“You probably would have hated the cake anyway.”
For a while, I told her everything.
Then I whispered, “I’m leaving him.”
Footsteps sounded behind me.
Alexander and Casey were coming up the hill.
Casey was still wearing athletic clothes from her competition.
“She insisted we come afterward,” Alexander said. “See? She’s more considerate than you think.”
Casey put a small bottle of bourbon beside the headstone.
“Mrs. Walker,” she announced, “sorry about yesterday. If Alexander ever treats Lucy badly, I’ll straighten him out.”
Then she pulled a red paint marker from her pocket.
Before I understood what she intended, she crouched beside the grave.
“This looks too gloomy.”
She drew a crooked flower beside Mom’s name.
Then she wrote:
AL GOT MARRIED. LOVE, CASEY.
I grabbed her wrist.
“Wipe it off.”
“What?”
“Now.”
“I was trying to make it festive.”
“Wipe it off.”
She jerked her arm free.
My shoe slipped on wet moss.
I fell down two stone steps.
My knee hit gravel. My elbow slammed against the edge of the monument.
Blood ran down my arm.
Alexander moved toward me.
Then Casey cried, “She grabbed me!”
He stopped.
I looked up.
“She wrote on my mother’s gravestone.”
Alexander frowned.
“Then clean it. Did you have to grab her?”
Casey tried wiping the paint with her sleeve.
It smeared into a red stain.
“Oops. Waterproof.”
My tears came then.
Not because of my arm.
Not because of the wedding.
Because Mom’s name was beneath that ugly red streak.
Alexander’s patience snapped.
He turned toward the headstone.
“Mrs. Walker, your daughter never learned how to handle conflict. She cries whenever something doesn’t go her way.”
I stared at him.
He kept speaking.
“She was like that when you were sick too. Every emergency became everyone else’s emergency. You asked me to take care of her, but you never told me how difficult she could be.”
My grief vanished.
In its place came silence.
Mom had spent her final months apologizing every time I changed her sheets, every time pain woke me at night, every time I drove her to chemotherapy.
And now he was standing at her grave using her last request as evidence against her.
“If your mother were here,” Alexander said, “she’d be disappointed in what you’ve become.”
I stood.
“Alexander, I want a divorce.”
His face changed.
He grabbed my injured arm.
Pain ripped through me.
“No.”
“Let go.”
“You think you can threaten me until I surrender? I’m not Casey. That doesn’t work.”
“This isn’t a threat.”
He released me.
“We’ll see.”
When I returned home that afternoon, the nursery door was open.
Alexander stood inside.
In his hand was the fetal heartbeat recorder from my pregnancy.
Our son Mason had died before birth.
That tiny memory card contained the only sound we had ever kept of him.
Alexander pulled it out.
Then he snapped it in half.
I forgot how to breathe.
“Consider that a warning,” he said.
Even his voice trembled.
He had loved Mason.
When I lost the baby, Alexander had collapsed beside my hospital bed and cried until he couldn’t speak.
But his need to defeat me was stronger than his grief.
“Today it’s only the recording,” he said. “Next time, think before you threaten our marriage.”
Casey called from the hall.
“The bags are downstairs!”
Alexander looked at me.
“We’re leaving for the honeymoon. When I come home, I expect you to have calmed down.”
Then he left.
I knelt beside the crib.
A tiny silver bracelet lay inside.
Alexander and I had once engraved the back together.
Mommy and Daddy love you forever, Mason.
I ran my thumb over the words.
So that was how short forever could be.
I placed the bracelet beside my passport.
Then I began packing.
