had as a child. The lies grew so thick, they now walled her in, making escape impossible.
Leaning back on the old wooden church pew of the ranch mission, Cozette wished she could close her eyes to everything and just drift away into nothingness. She took a deep breath, inhaling the musty smell of dust and cobwebs and candle wax.
She’d rushed home with her broken heart to find her father dying. She couldn’t tell him the truth then. He was in enough pain already. If he knew she might be pregnant, he’d probably use his last breath to yell at her.
But, as the days passed and he grew weaker, she thought her secret might be safe. She sat beside his bed telling stories of an imaginary love who planned to come for her. She even lied and told her father that they’d already been married by a judge in Austin. As she guessed he would, her father complained that as soon as her love arrived, they’d be married by the priest. Until then, her father had claimed it wasn’t a real marriage.
The rafters rattled as the wind blew through the holes in the old mission roof. Cozette looked up into the shadows of the loft thinking how hard it would be for an imaginary groom to appear tonight.
She’d thought she would slip away once her father recovered a little, or passed. Maybe she’d be gone for a few months, or even a year, and return home, an imaginary widow with a real baby. Only she’d gone too far with details, saying her husband planned to meet her at the Grand Hotel in Odessa.
When her father took a turn for the worse, her uncle Raymond told her she had to stay. He took the liberty, without telling Cozette, to send word for the man waiting for her in Odessa to come to the ranch.
From then on, her ball of lies began to unravel amid wedding plans. The house staff took over. They all knew the road to Odessa. A week’s journey in a wagon, half that on horseback. As they helped Cozette care for her father, they prepared for the proper wedding. It would have to be as soon as the groom arrived, for her father’s days were numbered.
Whispers circled in the hallways. The groom would be there in a few days, the housekeeper announced to everyone, and the maids began to clean while the cooks cooked. A week at the most, the housekeeper reasoned. Later, everyone except Cozette decided it would be three days if the weather held.
Two days.
Tomorrow.
And finally, last night they all agreed that he’d come before dawn.
Cozette thought she’d go mad worrying about when her imaginary groom would show up. She’d even let them dress her in her mother’s dress to wait, though she knew she was waiting for no one.
Then, her father, who’d never forgiven his wife for delivering him with a girl as their only child, did something Cozette never expected. At her uncle’s insistence, her father changed his will, leaving the huge ranch not to Cozette, but to her legal husband.
Cozette jumped off the bench and began to pace. Lying on the pew trying not to think wasn’t working. She had no one to blame but herself for this mess. She’d piled one lie on top of another and the chaos that was about to start at dawn, when no husband showed up, would be her funeral pyre.
She’d promised her father a hundred times when she was growing up that she’d never lie again. Without her mother to buffer his rage, he’d die hating her, disowning her, demanding she leave and never return. Her father and her uncle weren’t men who tempered rage. They didn’t just get mad, they got deadly, and at dawn they’d both be furious with her.
Without a husband showing up to claim her and the baby growing inside, her uncle would inherit the only home she’d ever known and kick her out with his dying brother’s blessing.
Since she had no hope of an imaginary husband showing up, she had only one path left. She planned to pray herself dead before morning and save everyone else the trouble of murdering her.
There was no other way out.
Better to die now with the priest waiting outside the door. He could perform the funeral. Cooks were baking all night for the wedding breakfast. It would serve as the meal for the wake. More gifts and guests would arrive tomorrow. Everyone would attend her funeral instead