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I looked beautiful, and the dress was gorgeous.
Sadly, the way I felt on the inside did not match my outward appearance.
Inside, I felt numb.
Dead.
I mean, that shouldn’t have been entirely unbelievable either, considering I felt as though there had been a death of sorts.
My future was done.
Gone.
Any of the hopes and dreams I’d had about my future had been flushed down the toilet, and somehow, even though I was sad, I couldn’t bring myself to be angry.
I had to do this for my family.
And the worst part about it all was that I had to pretend it wasn’t going to kill me inside to do it. I had to put on a happy face and act like this was everything I’d wanted in my life.
When my eyes finally made it to my face, it was a wonder I could recognize the woman staring back at me. All that I thought I knew about myself seemed to have vanished, and I felt like I was quickly losing hold on the person I was.
Everything inside me was screaming at me to run away, to stop this before it started. If I didn’t, the overwhelming devastation and loss I felt now would only get worse as time went on.
This was insanity. What woman, let alone a nineteen-year-old girl, marries someone she just met for the first time two months ago? In the instant I asked myself that question, my heart immediately went out to all the women and girls who had been forced into arranged marriages. This felt like it was going to be the worst kind of prison.
I didn’t know him.
We hadn’t dated.
He knew nothing about what I liked or disliked.
And yet, I was standing here now in a wedding dress, so I could marry him.
I couldn’t do it.
The moment that thought filtered through my mind, the door to the room opened, and my dad walked in. Any resolve I had to walk away from this evaporated. Part of my reason for doing this was walking right toward me.
My dad looked utterly broken, just as broken as my mom had looked before she left me in this room to go and seek him out. If anything, my father might have been worse off than my mother.
This was taking its toll on him, and he felt beyond responsible.
As it turned out, my father’s company had gotten involved in a big project. No, not just big. It was massive. Huge. Enormous.
There was a multimillion-dollar mall being built.
With that project, my father had relied on several investors to cover the majority of the costs. But at the last minute, one of the investors backed out. It wasn’t uncommon for something like that to happen, though it occasionally did.
The downside in this case was that my dad had been so confident about this project that he leveraged our personal assets to make up the difference of what was needed to secure the necessary funding. Without the investor, the project wouldn’t proceed, and no matter how many people he’d attempted to reach out to, nobody was willing to make the commitment.
Nobody besides Preston Crespo.
Desperate to save our family from losing everything, my father took a meeting with Preston. They had been struggling to work out the terms that day they’d been meeting in the office, but after meeting me, Preston had an idea.
“I want to tell you that you look beautiful, Ellery,” my dad said, his voice thick with emotion. “Because you do look beautiful. But this isn’t how it’s supposed to be. I can’t let you do this.”
He’d fought this from the first moment he realized what Preston wanted.
Not wanting him to feel any more guilt than he already felt, I smiled at him. “It’s okay, Dad. It’s going to be okay.”
