Page 5 of Sundown Somewhere

DOLLY

Jeff’s not here.

Errr…what?!

I repeat Hux’s words, trying to make them make sense. I know what each word means, but something about stringing them together in that order doesn’t compute.

How can he not be here? It’s our wedding.

“The boys get lost on the way over from the Ramblers’ Rest?” I laugh it off, thinking this must be some kind of bachelor prank. Jeff’s brother, Jeremy, would absolutely pull that kind of thing. “Or are they just that hungover. Wait, no…please don’t tell me they’re still drunk.”

Hux swallows hard, the muscles in his throat visibly contracting, his mouth pinned in as straight a line as I’ve ever seen. Flicking his eyes over to the girls, then back to me, he shifts his weight, clearly trying to buy time before he answers. He’s nervous. There’s something he doesn’t want to tell me.

Huxley Hayes has been my best friend since the third grade. To this day, I still feel the butterflies in my tummy when I think about him coming up to me on the playground, leveling me with those hazel eyes and that signature Hayes smirk that was alive and well even at that age, and hitting me with the line, “So, you’re my Wendy,” in reference to us being cast as Peter Pan and Wendy in the class play. He has been by my side for every single important event in my life. No one knows me like he does.

Likewise, no one knows him like I do.

Which is why I know that right now, he’s hiding something. Something big.

“What is it?” I ask. “What’s going on?”

“Jeff’s not here⁠—”

“Yes, I caught that, Huxley,” I snap. “So, where is he?”

Hux shifts again, this time producing an envelope, holding it out to me. My name is scribbled across the front, my fiancé’s handwriting clear as day. That’s when it hits me.

Jeff isn’t here.

“He’s not coming, is he?” I manage to choke out the words, my voice sounding foreign even to me.

“He left this,” Hux responds, not fully confirming or denying anything.

My heart stops, my stomach rolling as a chill settles over the room, everyone seeming to freeze in place. Holy shit. He’s not coming. The groom isn’t showing up to the wedding.

I’m being left at the altar.

And to think, I had been the one having doubts.

Guess I wasn’t alone in that.

“What does it say?”

“I didn’t read it.”

I nod. Just like Hux. Of course he didn’t. Had it been one of the girls, they’d have held it up to a light or tried to steam it open so they’d know what we were getting into before bringing it to me. But not Hux.

Taking it from him, I park myself on the bench in front of the large lighted mirror. I need to read it. Need to know what it says.

Yet, there’s another part of me that wants to enjoy these last few moments before whatever this holds sets in. The moments where I’m the one wondering in the back of my mind if I’m really going to walk down that aisle.

It’s just cold feet…

That’s what I’d convinced myself. That’s what I had reasoned out after I drunkenly confessed to Alice at my bachelorette weekend that I wasn’t sure that I was in love with Jeff. After six years together—three years of being engaged and planning a wedding, questioning whether or not it was ever really going to happen—I was just all up in my own head, letting the nerves of the day get to me.

That’s all.

Even if deep down I know that’s a lie.