The reasonable answer is no. The adult, face-your-consequences answer is to call Ezra, go back to the apartment, and deal with the wreckage of my life like a grown woman.
My head is moving before I can stop it. Nodding.
Yes.
Not because I’m not terrified. I’m vibrating with it. But I don’t have the strength to deal with the fallout. I need air. I need theroad. I need the mercy of forward motion where I don’t have to hear the echo of my own failure.
I just need to breathe.
“I can’t go back,” I say again. “Not yet. I know I have to face it, but I just need… I need—”
“Time?” he supplies.
“Yes.”
He nods, decisive. “Then we keep driving.”
He picks up the veil from the sink and holds the door open.
I take one last look at the warped mirror and the woman in a ruined wedding dress. She looks like she just made the most terrifying decision of her life.
She also looks, for the first time in three years, like Piper.
Eleven
Griffin
How I ended up here is genuinely beyond me.
Two hours ago, I sat in a church pew next to Noah, silently studying the vaulted ceiling and wondering if my dry cleaning was ready. Now, I’m doing seventy on a California highway with a runaway bride in my passenger seat and seventeen missed calls on a phone I have facedown in the center console. Every time it buzzed, Piper’s jaw tightened, and her hands sank further into her lap, so I killed the noise.
I called Noah at the gas station.
His number one concern? Is she safe?
He told me to call if anything changes and hung up.
That was it. The Callahan family’s collective reaction to their daughter walking out of her own wedding seems to be a sense of relief. This tells me everything I need to know about Ezra without any of them having to say a word.
Piper has been mostly quiet during the drive. She’s not staring blankly into the distance or showing signs of an imminent breakdown. She’s simply sitting, watching the scenery pass by with the focused attention of someone who remains presentbecause the alternative is whatever’s in the rearview mirror. I understand that instinct well enough to leave it alone.
Outside, the landscape has changed to a type of California that doesn’t show up on postcards—dry hills, sporadic orchards, and towns that come and go before you can notice them.
I keep coming back to the same thing: this is not the Piper I know.
I’ve been trying to figure it out since the balcony last night. Piper grew up with a certain confidence—the kind that comes when you realize early on that you’re exceptional at something and build your entire identity around it. She was a kid who knew exactly who she was because the music told her.
Today, I watched her spiral into a kind of self-doubt that doesn’t just happen; it’s built. Gradually and deliberately, just like anything structural fails—not from one big break, but from a slow accumulation of small stresses until what was load-bearing can no longer hold.
I see a sign.WELCOME TO OPAL CREEK. POPULATION 4,200.
I take the exit.
Main Street is two blocks of storefronts, a diner, and a clothing boutique with a hand-lettered sandwich board that reads:SUMMER ARRIVALS.
I park and look at Piper. She’s still in the dress, which is a problem we need to solve. She has no proper shoes, no bag, no phone, nothing but the silk on her back and the absolute conviction that she is not ready to go home.
“Okay,” I say.
