Chapter 1 Charlotte’s POV

Charlotte POV

Two years ago...

The bouquet in my hands is strangling me.

Not literally, but the way my fingers have locked around the stems  white-knuckled, roses pressed so hard against my palms that the thorns are probably drawing blood. I'm starting to wonder if the flowers can feel my panic. My dress cost three months of rent and looks like it cost six, which was the entire point. A budget-conscious bride pulls off the impossible. Gold star. Add it to the spreadsheet.

I've been spreadsheet-ing this wedding for fourteen months. Every florist, every centerpiece, every dietary restriction on the catering card. I got my mother and Rylan's mother to agree on the color scheme, which historians will one day record as a minor miracle. Everything is optimized. Everything is prepared. Everything is exactly as it should be.

So why does the inside of my chest feel like a paper bag someone is slowly crumpling?

Pre-wedding nerves. Obviously.

The chapel smells the way old churches always do  woodsmoke and dried flowers and time  and in any other context I would find it calming. Right now it's making me nauseous. Or maybe that's the fact that I ate exactly two bites of toast this morning before my stomach staged a full rebellion.

"You're stunning," my mother says, repositioning my veil for what has to be the twentieth time. Her hands smell like lavender. They always smell like lavender. It is one of the most reliable constants of my entire life, and right now I am holding onto that scent like a life preserver.

"Thanks, Mom."

My voice is the one I use when Christopher Blackwell's investors call the office and start throwing their weight around  composed, pleasant, entirely impenetrable. Professional Charlotte. She doesn't flinch. She doesn't sweat. She also, as a general rule, doesn't get married, but today we're making an exception.

Hannah appears in the doorway. She's my best friend and my maid of honor, and the look on her face is  strange. Not beaming. Not teary. Something careful and pressed flat, like she has folded something away behind her eyes that she doesn't want me to see yet.

"Everyone's seated," she says.

"Rylan?" I ask. "How's he looking? Terrified? Crying?"

He would be crying. That's a fact I know with complete certainty. Rylan cries at insurance commercials. He cried at a particularly emotional episode of a cooking competition show once, and I had to pretend I didn't see it to preserve his dignity. He is going to absolutely fall apart when I walk through those doors, and I am going to hold myself together for approximately twelve seconds before I completely lose it too.

Hannah's expression does something complicated. "I haven't spotted him yet. He's probably with the groomsmen."

Which is fine. Of course it's fine. Groomsmen have a whole prep process, don't they? Boutonnières to straighten, vows to review the ritual of ten minutes of pretending not to be nervous while being obviously nervous. He's with the groomsmen. That's where he is.

I check my watch. Four minutes.

The coordinator materializes from wherever wedding coordinators lurk  some organizational dimension adjacent to ours  clipboard in hand, already in motion. "It's time."

"Is Rylan at the"

"He's waiting." Brisk. Final. Already moving toward the doors.

I exhale a breath I didn't realize I'd been holding. My dad offers his arm. He's wearing the cologne he's worn to every significant occasion of my life  graduations, my first job interview, now this  and the familiar smell of it makes my throat tighten in a way that has nothing to do with dread and everything to do with the fact that this man has shown up for every single moment, and I love him completely.

"My girl," he says, which is all he says, and it's enough.

The doors open.

The string quartet begins  not the traditional march, because Rylan and I had decided on the first song we ever danced to, clumsy and laughing in his terrible apartment with no furniture, three weeks into knowing each other. I had insisted on that detail specifically. I had held onto it like a talisman. It felt like proof of something.

I start walking.

The chapel is full of people turning to look at me, and I give them the smile I mean, not the professional one, and I focus on my breathing and I look toward the altar

He's not there.

I keep walking.

Maybe he's standing to the side. Maybe the angle is wrong. Maybe he stepped behind the minister for some completely logical reason that will be funny later, and I will tell this story at dinner parties for years. Remember when Rylan vanished on our wedding day and I actually kept walking down the aisle like an absolute maniac because I was in denial?

Halfway down.

The altar is empty except for James, Rylan's best friend, standing there in a rented tuxedo with a boutonnière that has tilted forty-five degrees to the left. He looks like a man who has been handed a grenade and told to hold it until further notice.

I stop walking.

No, I don't. I keep going. Because seventy-eight people are watching me, and the only thing worse than being abandoned at the altar is being abandoned at the altar while also losing your composure entirely in front of your second cousin who already thought you were too uptight.

My father passes me off with a look of confusion and love and helplessness all braided together, and I take my place, and I look at James, and I already know.

"Where is he?" The words come out very small. Nothing like my professional voice. Nothing like any version of me I recognize.

James can barely meet my eyes. "Charlotte. I'mGod, I'm so sorry."

The congregation murmurs. A sound like weather moving through a building.

"He's not coming."

It is not a question. My voice says it the way you say a thing you already knew was true but spent weeks convincing yourself was impossible.

"He called twenty minutes ago." James looks like he is actively wishing he could dissolve into the floor. "He said he couldn't do it. He said he was sorry."

I laugh.

It surprises me as much as anyone else in that chapel, this short, shocked sound that escapes before I can stop it. And then the tears came, which I had promised myself absolutely would not happen, but apparently my tear ducts did not receive that particular memo and have decided to act unilaterally.

I blink them back. Hard.

No. Not here. Not in front of seventy-eight people and a string quartet that has gone completely silent because there is, as it turns out, no appropriate musical accompaniment for this exact situation. I will cry later. I will cry spectacularly and at length and into something chocolate-based, and it will be ugly and private and entirely on my own terms. But not here.

"Thank you all for coming," I say, and my voice is steady, and I hate that it is steady, and I am also deeply grateful for it. I turn to face the pews, and I look at my mother crying in the third row, and Rylan's mother who has gone the color of old wax, and my college roommate who is already on her phone, and I address all of them with the same tone I use when I inform Christopher Blackwell that his 3pm has been rescheduled due to circumstances beyond anyone's control. "There's been a change of plans. The wedding won't be happening today. Please stay for the reception, the food is paid for, the venue is beautiful, and it would be a genuine waste to let it go to nothing."

Then I walk back down the aisle.

Alone.

The same path I came in on. The same stained glass throwing the same colored light across the same white runner. It looks different walking this direction. It looks like the end of something, which is, in fact, exactly what it is.

In the bridal room, I take off my veil. My hands are steady, which is either a sign of great inner strength or shock so complete it has temporarily bypassed the nervous system. Probably the second one.

Hannah comes in thirty seconds later, fury radiating off her in visible waves. "I will end him. I swear to you"

"There's a line," I tell her. "You're not at the front of it."

She sits beside me, and for a moment neither of us says anything, because there is nothing useful to say, and Hannah, whatever her other qualities, knows when language is completely inadequate.

"What do you need?" she finally asks.

I think about the question seriously. What I need is the last fourteen months back. What I need is an answer. What I need is to not be sitting in a bridal room in a dress I can't return, holding flowers that are going to die in three days regardless of what happens to me.

"Ice cream," I decided. "Significant quantities. And I want to leave before anyone tries to have a conversation with me in this dress."

She nods. Practical. Efficient. She starts gathering my things.

I look at myself in the mirror that someone optimistically positioned in this room. The veil is off. The dress is still perfect. My makeup is  somehow  holding, which is almost offensive given the circumstances.

I make myself a promise in that mirror, the kind you make when you are certain enough that it cuts:

Never again. No waiting at altars for people who've already decided not to show. No handing someone else the blueprint to everything that matters and trusting them not to lose it.

I am the only person who will never leave me standing in a church.

That will have to be enough.

I pick up my bag, and I walk out of that bridal room, and I leave the flowers on the chair.