It’s not a nightmare. Or, it is, but it’s the kind that doesn’t end when you wake up.
I squeeze my eyes shut, press the heels of my hands into them until tiny white bursts bloom behind my lids. I let myself pretend I’m back in my tiny apartment with the ugly beige carpet, the humming mini fridge, and the faint smell of burned coffee. There’s a silk dress hanging on the back of the closet door, but I haven’t put it on yet. I still have time.
But when I open my eyes, it’s not my apartment. The air is cold in that particular old-house way, and the sheets smell of detergent and hay and something that’s just… McCoy. My grandmother’s locket lies cool against my skin, the chain twisted from sleep.
Yesterday slams into me all at once.
The dress. My father’s fist on the bridal suite door. Evan’s card. The way my chest felt like it was caving in, the walls closing in with it. My own face in the mirror—a stranger in tulle. My hand on the doorknob. The bite of winter. Headlights and snow, and that horrible slippery moment where the car stops listening to you and starts listening to gravity instead.
Dallas’s face, looming over me in the dark and steam, blue eyes wide.
“Oh no,” I say to the empty room. “Oh shit, what did I do?”
I shove the covers down and sit up too fast. The room tilts before it rights itself. My head throbs dully, a hangover without the fun part. I swing my legs over the side of the bed.
The floor is cold against my socked feet.
My wedding dress lies in a heap on a chair, a white, crumpled rejection of an entire life. The sight of it makes my stomach flip. It’s ridiculous that a pile of fabric can look wounded, but this one does. I’ve broken some sacred, frilly oath.
I don’t know what time it is. The light says late morning or early afternoon; my body says I could sleep another twelve years if someone let me. My brain saysabsolutely not, get up, fix this.
I search for my phone automatically, then remember the arc it made when I hurled it out the window, and the satisfying, stupid finality of it disappearing into the dark and the snow. My stomach drops.
“Right,” I mutter. “I did that too.”
Without the phone, there’s no buffer between me and all the people whose lives I just detonated.
Evan.
My father.
The guests. The florist. The caterer. The hundreds of tiny cogs that went into building that glittering, perfect day I walked away from.
I press my fingertips to my temple and breathe, but the panic is already rising.
Evan is unpleasant, but predictable. He’s going to be furious, humiliated. He’ll talk about his reputation and optics and how hard it is to rebuild trust with investors when your fiancée vanishes minutes before the wedding. He’ll probably send some long, beautifully structured email about my “emotional volatility” and how it’s best we go our separate ways. He’ll repaint the whole mess as his decision. For control. For appearances.
I can handle Evan.
It’s my father I’m terrified of.
He loves to punish.
I don’t mean he’s going to hit me. He never has. That would be too simple, too crude. William Ross doesn’t raise his voice or his hand if he can help it. He hurts people with strategy and patience.
Images flick through my mind, fast and ugly.
The time his business partner of fifteen years dared to say no to a deal he wanted. The man’s son was up for a promotion at the firm. Dad didn’t yell. He just made a few calls, and thepromotion disappeared. Suddenly, there were whispers about “attitude problems,” and the guy was moved to some windowless office in accounting. Dad poured himself a drink that night and told me, almost cheerfully, “No one gets to walk away without understanding what they’ve lost, Faith. That’s how you keep order.”
Order.
Or the time our neighbor in Dallas, Mrs. Collins, got into a legal dispute over a property line with him. She was in the wrong, technically. The fence had been a few inches over on his side for years. He could have let it go; they’d been friendly, in that country club kind of way. Instead, he took her to court. He won, of course. She lost a strip of land, thousands in legal fees, and every one of her friends who didn’t want to risk choosing the losing side.
“She’ll think twice before trying to outmaneuver me again,” he’d said at dinner. I was young and still thought, somewhere in my stupid heart, that being on his good side meant I’d never end up like Mrs. Collins.
Then there was the intern who had respectfully corrected him in a meeting once. Dad smiled, thanked him, and afterwards told his assistant not to renew the kid’s contract.
“He can be right somewhere else,” he said. “We don’t reward people who embarrass me.”
