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“You’re marrying her.”
Now, I know that isn’t what all this is about—I know that Drew fully understands the logistics of my upcoming marriage. He’s been in on the plan from day one. Fuck, he’s the reason we have a plan at all. And yet the words are the worst gut punch. This is grief and mental illness and a man at the end of his rope, and my guilt about knocks me over regardless.
I bite my lip to keep from crying. This is the most horrible situation I’ve ever faced. I would rather be homeless and living on the street with people spitting on me for the rest of my life than spend one more minute seeing the man I love suffering like this.
Being in love is hard.
All I have left is the hope that this love is worth it.
“Let’s get out of here,” I say, begging any god that exists for Drew to trust me one more time.
“I need help,” he says.
“Let’s get you some help, babe.” I hold out my hand, still not daring to take one step closer. This is the one step I’m praying he’ll take for himself.
Drew reaches for my hand and stands up.
A few hours later, I’m sitting next to him in an intake office trying not to throw up when the psychiatrist assessing him asks if he ever has thoughts of harming himself, and he says yes.
I might as well be carving out my own heart and stuffing it in his pocket as they lead him through the locked doors, because that’s where it’s going to be until he comes back to me.
If he comes back.
I think, maybe, back in February, I should have let him go.
I’m not saying I thought I was the human equivalent of Prozac and offered him some sort of miraculous cure via my asshole and cock, but I did stupidly believe I made him happy. This, though—this is my fault. Because I couldn’t—I couldn’t let him go.
At some point I stopped being able to picture my world without him in it, and I think that happened way before I ever admitted anything like that to him.
Elodie waits with Mallory in the lobby of the private hospital where Drew will be getting treatment for his depression for the first time in his life. They fold me into their perfumed arms, and their long hair curtains my face while I finally allow myself to fall apart, my chest so empty and hollow, I don’t understand how I’m still alive.
“We don’t have to do it, Ollie,” Elodie whispers to me when there’s finally a break between my sobs.
As much as I know Drew didn’t wind up here because of the wedding, there’s a huge part of me that wants to take Elodie up on the offer to drop the act. Tell my parents the cold, hard, truth, and let the chips fall. What’s the fucking point of an inheritance if I don’t have him?
But Elodie is too important to me to hang her out to dry. We’ve only gotten half our advance, and it’s not enough for her to distance herself the way she needs to from her father. She needs me as much as Drew does. She needs my name, and she needs a safe place to live when news of the book comes out, which will be at the end of June. “I want to do it,” I say.
I want to burn the fucking world.
The Lafayette-Arnaud wedding is enormous, elegant, and sports a price tag north of two million dollars. An ostentatious display of wealth and status even I find disgusting.
I focus on the details of the day. Unable to contact Drew for seventy-two hours, I channel all my restlessness and anxiety—and rage—into putting on the performance of a lifetime.
Elodie makes an exceptionally beautiful bride in a custom Vera Wang gown with classic lines and a cathedral-length veil. I wear a white tuxedo with a white silk tie. I have two groomsmen—cousins I haven’t spoken to in years. Elodie’s maid of honor is Mallory. Her bridesmaids are also relatives whose names I didn’t bother learning. My best man is Jeremy, much to my parents’ irritation. Because “Who the hell is Jeremy?”
I want to tell them they’re lucky it’s not my former doorman who looks better than anyone on the planet in a tux.
But I just tell them Jeremy is important to me, and he won’t make a scene.
Once it’s legal, Elodie and I get drunk. We drink all the champagne, we dance to every song we know, we get photographed from every possible angle, and I’m relatively sure we don’t look like we’re in love—we look like we just got away with the crime of the century.
Because we kind of have.
She pulls me onto the dance floor for the last song of the night. I hold her in a classic dance pose.
“How are you holding up?” she asks.
“I’m pretty drunk,” I admit.
