I knew whose wedding it was before I ever saw the bride.
Chapter 1
Three parking spaces from mine sat a silver Honda with a faded green grocery co-op sticker crooked on the rear window. I had ridden in that car for three years. I had cried in it, eaten drive-through fries in it, slept against the passenger door on long trips, and once spent forty minutes searching its floorboards for an earring that had been tangled in my hair the entire time.
The car belonged to Jake Holloway, the man I had once expected to marry.
I sat behind the wheel with both hands locked around it and stared at the restored red barn beyond the windshield. White ribbons fluttered from fence posts. A wooden sign near the entrance read WELCOME TO OUR FOREVER in looping gold letters. Somewhere inside, a bride was waiting for me to make her beautiful for the man who had broken my heart.
For one cowardly minute, I considered driving away.
I could claim food poisoning. A migraine. A family emergency. Brides heard excuses every day, and another artist might be found if the coordinator panicked hard enough. But my rolling makeup case was in the trunk, the deposit had been paid weeks ago, and I had spent six years building a reputation for never abandoning a bride.
Besides, some stubborn part of me wanted proof that Jake Holloway no longer had the power to ruin my day.
I met him when I was twenty-four at a Fourth of July cookout behind my college roommate’s house in Columbus, Ohio. He had been standing near a sagging fence, debating a fantasy football trade with such seriousness you’d have thought Congress was waiting on his vote. Then he laughed—a ridiculous, nasal honk that made everyone around him laugh harder—and I decided I liked him before he ever introduced himself.
We stayed together three years.
Three years is long enough to learn a person’s private operating system. I knew Jake needed a fan running to sleep even when snow piled against the windows. I knew noisy restaurants made him irritable, though he’d insist they didn’t. I knew that when he went silent during long drives, asking him repeatedly whether he was angry would only push him deeper into himself.
He knew things about me too.
At least I thought he did.
We broke up on an October Tuesday in the parking lot of a Trader Joe’s. There was no betrayal, no other woman, no dramatic screaming match. He simply said we wanted different things, which is what people say when the real truth has become too exhausting to explain.
It took me a year and a half to feel normal afterward. I moved apartments, adopted a mutt named Biscuit whose left ear never stood up properly, rebuilt my bridal business, and learned to spend Saturdays helping women prepare for futures I no longer felt cheated out of.
Until that morning.
I breathed the way my therapist had taught me—four counts in, four holding, six out—then unloaded my kit and walked inside.
The bride’s name was Casey Monroe.
She was tall, dark-haired, pretty in an open, unguarded way, and vibrating with the frantic energy of a woman who had been awake since dawn wondering whether every tiny decision she’d made for the last eleven months had been wrong.
“Oh, thank God,” she said when she saw me. “Tell me you can fix whatever this is.”
She waved both hands around her face.
“I can fix makeup,” I said. “The rest costs extra.”
She laughed, and I liked her immediately.
That made everything worse.
The bridal suite smelled of coffee, hairspray, and fresh lumber. Six women moved around in matching robes while Casey’s mother, Sharon, steamed a dress with the intensity of a bomb technician. Casey’s maid of honor, Madison, was organizing jewelry. Someone else was trying to convince the florist by phone that silver-dollar eucalyptus and seeded eucalyptus were not interchangeable.
I arranged my brushes beside the window and concentrated on what I knew how to do.
Primer. Color correction. Foundation. Concealer.
For nearly an hour, I let professionalism carry me.
Then Madison leaned against the wall and grinned at Casey. “You still haven’t explained how you two moved so fast. Fourteen months from first date to engagement? That’s insane.”
Casey’s smile softened.
“He just knew,” she said. “Third date, he told me he wasn’t interested in wasting my time.”
My brush slowed.
Jake had dated me nearly two years before he introduced me to some of his closest college friends.
I hated myself for noticing the difference.
Before I could think about it too long, there was a knock on the door.
A man’s voice called from the hall.
“Case, photographer wants us in twenty.”
Every nerve in my body recognized that voice.
The door opened halfway, and Jake leaned inside.
He looked older than he had in my memories. There was gray at his temples now. His face had filled out slightly, and his gray suit fit him better than anything he’d owned when we were together.
His eyes landed on me.
For one second, the years between us disappeared.
Then his face rearranged itself into polite surprise.
“Oh,” he said. “Hey. Good to see you.”
“Hey.”
I kept my brush moving across Casey’s cheek.
She laughed and threw a couch pillow toward him. “You’re not supposed to see me!”
Jake ducked away, laughing that same old honking laugh.
“Twenty minutes!”
The door closed.
Madison looked at me.
Not long enough to accuse me of anything. Just long enough to make me wonder what my face had revealed.
I finished Casey’s eyeliner while my heartbeat slowly returned to normal.
Then she smiled at herself in the mirror and said, “You know what’s crazy? Jake told me exactly how today would go.”
I glanced at her reflection.
“He said around two I’d probably get overwhelmed by all the noise. He said I needed to eat before the ceremony even if I wasn’t hungry because otherwise I’d get shaky and cranky without realizing why. He reminded my mom to keep water near me because I always forget to drink when I’m nervous.”
She gave a small, grateful laugh.
“He just gets me. Sometimes it honestly scares me how well that man knows me.”
The brush stopped in my hand.
Because none of those things belonged to Casey.
They belonged to me.
