more than anywhere, trying to throw myself into work so I could take my mind off the impending wedding. I couldn’t go ride Tank, couldn’t go to the treehouse, couldn’t go anywhere I used to find solace — because now, all I found in those places were memories of her.
When I finally made it home, it was well past sunset, and I noticed a white envelope half tucked under my front door as I twisted my key in the lock.
I bent to retrieve it with a frown, and that frown had deepened when I read in small, neat script on the front of it:
Read this before tomorrow. It’s important.
My heart had leapt into my throat, and I instantly thought it was a letter from Ruby Grace.
I’d flown inside, thrown my shit haphazardly on whatever surface was nearby, and torn into the envelope with greedy hands, greedy eyes, a greedy heart. But, the letter wasn’t from Ruby Grace at all.
It was from Betty.
And in that letter, she’d revealed the missing piece to the puzzle I’d been trying to solve since the moment Ruby Grace left me in the rain at the treehouse my father built.
That letter was tucked into the inside pocket of my tuxedo, and as if it possessed the courage I needed to walk through the church doors, I brushed a hand over my chest where it was hidden, taking a deep breath. My eyes scanned the large wooden doors of the church — the ones I had walked through nearly every Sunday morning since I was born — and I wondered how they could look so foreign.
Inside those doors, there was an aisle lined with flowers and twine — both of which I’d helped Ruby Grace pick out.
Inside those doors, there were hundreds of people, nearly the entire town of Stratford, and then some.
Inside those doors, there was a man waiting at the end of the aisle for the woman I loved.
And inside those doors was the woman I couldn’t let go of.
My breath was surprisingly steady as I finally found the will to open those doors, like I knew what I was going to do when the reality was I didn’t have a fucking clue. But, I extended one steady hand for the wedding program being offered to me, took my seat at the end of the back left pew, and I waited.
I was practically invisible to everyone inside, and in that moment, I was thankful my entire family had declined the open invitation to the wedding. I knew they had done so on my behalf.
None of them knew I was here today.
The other wedding guests were all chattering with their friends or families or dates, commenting on the beautiful decorations or the stunning music coming from a harp player near the organ at the front. It was a shushed sort of chatter as we all waited for the ceremony to begin.
And it would.
In less than ten minutes.
It’s too late, the realistic part of my brain warned me as I sat there, both hands on the wedding program, eyes cast toward the altar. She’s marrying him. Today. There’s nothing you can do.
But, there was something more powerful floating inside my chest, calming my breaths, easing my racing heart. It fluttered and filled me from the inside out with an inexplicable anticipation, like something epic was about to happen.
Hope.
I recognized it faintly as time warped and faded. I couldn’t even be sure I was truly in the church — that’s how detached I felt from my being. It wasn’t until the moment I noticed a familiar pair of eyes watching me from the third pew that I came back to the moment.
Betty smiled, casting me a wink. I returned her smile, and it was as if that notion alone brought on all the jitters I’d been surpassing. My heart thundered to life in my chest, my hands shaking where they held the program, and I swore my feet were about to move without permission from my brain to hightail us out of there just as the harp died and the organ began to play.
The same camera crew that had followed Anthony and Ruby Grace around the Soirée was scattered throughout the church, cameras pointed in all different directions, with one free moving around the church and capturing the chatter before the ceremony. That camera moved to the center of the aisle, crouched low and out of view once the familiar hymn filled the air.