I knew whose wedding it was before I ever saw the bride.
Chapter 2
For three years, I had explained those exact things to Jake.
Crowded rooms exhausted me faster than I realized. If I skipped lunch, my hands started trembling before I noticed I was hungry. When I got anxious, I forgot to drink water and ended up with a headache that made me short-tempered.
I had apologized for those habits more times than I could count.
Jake had listened.
Apparently, he had remembered too.
Now he was presenting my old instruction manual to another woman as though he’d developed some extraordinary gift for understanding her.
“You okay?” Casey asked.
I realized my brush was hovering an inch from her face.
“Fine,” I said. “Lost my train of thought.”
I finished her makeup.
It may have been the best work I had ever done.
Her skin looked luminous without seeming heavily covered. Her eyes were defined but soft. The blush brought warmth into her cheeks, and when I finally turned her toward the large mirror, she stared at herself and pressed one hand against her chest.
“Oh my gosh.”
Sharon stopped steaming long enough to gasp.
Madison smiled. “That’s you. That’s completely you.”
Casey’s eyes filled.
“That’s exactly what I wanted,” she whispered. “I look like myself.”
That should have been the end of my involvement.
But while I packed my brushes, the coordinator asked whether I could stay through photographs for touch-ups. She offered another hundred dollars.
I heard myself say yes.
Maybe I wanted the money. Maybe I was too proud to leave. Or maybe some part of me needed to remain until this strange collision between my old life and someone else’s future had finished telling me whatever it had dragged me there to learn.
Around one o’clock, I went outside to restock blotting papers from my car.
Jake was near a cooler with his groomsmen. When the others moved toward the photographer, he stayed behind long enough to grab a bottle of water.
That left us alone.
“Thanks for doing this,” he said.
“No problem.”
“Casey’s been nervous about the makeup for months.”
“She looks beautiful.”
He nodded.
“Yeah. She really does.”
There was a silence full of sentences neither of us intended to say.
Then Jake shoved his free hand into his pocket.
“I told her to call you, actually.”
My eyes lifted to his.
He seemed to regret saying it immediately.
“You did?”
“Your work’s good. I remembered that.”
For a second, I almost laughed. During the last year of our relationship, Jake had complained constantly about my weekend schedule, the clutter of supplies in our bathroom, the endless brides texting at midnight because they had suddenly decided they hated their eyebrow shape.
Now he stood in front of me and spoke about my work as though he’d always respected it.
“Well,” I said, “she’s happy.”
“She is.”
He walked away.
That should have settled it, but it didn’t.
Back inside, Casey mentioned the same thing without knowing Jake already had.
“I almost didn’t book you,” she said while Madison adjusted her veil. “Jake gave me three names, but he was weirdly specific about yours.”
She laughed.
“I wondered if he had some secret reason.”
My fingers tightened around a powder compact.
“Maybe he liked my portfolio.”
“That’s what he said.”
I smiled.
Professional. Neutral. Harmless.
But the question stayed with me.
Why had Jake wanted me there?
An hour later, one of Casey’s younger cousins dropped into the chair beside my station and began showing me rehearsal-dinner pictures on her phone.
“That’s Trevor,” she said, pointing to Jake’s best man. “He’s known Jake since elementary school. He keeps saying this is the happiest he’s ever seen him.”
I nodded politely.
She swiped again.
“My aunt says Jake’s completely different now. More affectionate, more open. She said his last relationship really messed him up, and Casey kind of fixed him.”
There it was.
His last relationship.
Me.
I wasn’t angry at the girl. She couldn’t have known. But something old and bruised shifted under my ribs.
I remembered asking Jake to hold my hand in public and feeling ridiculous when he acted surprised. I remembered waiting through silent drives, wondering which invisible rule I had broken. I remembered begging him to tell me what he felt instead of making me guess.
And now, apparently, he was affectionate.
Open.
Fixed.
People like to say the right person changes you.
Maybe sometimes that’s true.
But sitting there, listening to strangers praise the improved version of a man I had loved, I wondered whether some people simply practice on one heart until they’re ready to be better with the next.
The ceremony took place behind the barn beneath an arch wrapped in greenery.
I stood near the catering tent with my touch-up bag over one shoulder. I wasn’t part of the wedding, but I could see enough.
Casey’s father walked her down the aisle.
He was a broad-shouldered man who looked as if crying had surprised him and he had decided not to fight it. Tears rolled freely down his face while his daughter held his arm.
That touched me more deeply than anything else that day.
There was no mystery in his love.
No withholding.
No lesson to decode.
When Casey reached the altar, Jake cried too.
That startled me.
In three years together, I had never seen him cry. Not when his grandmother died. Not during our breakup. Not even during the worst fight we ever had, when I stood in our kitchen shaking and asked whether he loved me enough to actually let me feel loved.
But he cried for Casey.
For one dangerous second, the old question rose inside me.
Why wasn’t I enough?
Then Casey turned toward him.
And I saw something I had refused to admit all morning.
She wasn’t stealing the life that should have been mine.
She was living hers.
