Then again, nothing he said or did could surprise me anymore.
I was leaving anyway. Might as well grant him this one last favor.
"Fine."
Maybe it was how easily I agreed that finally snapped Harrison out of his blindness.
He noticed, at last, that the shattered thing on the floor was our wedding photo.
And that the top of my foot was slick with blood.
His eyes went red in an instant. He rushed back to the bridal suite to grab the first aid kit.
The moment he was gone, Claudia lifted her chin and sneered at me.
"Tilda, you really are pathetic. You already know I'm Harrison's wife, and you still thought you could go through with the wedding?"
"So what if his mother doesn't like me? She can fight it all she wants. Harrison still married me."
"Tomorrow's wedding? It'll be mine. And Harrison will only ever be my man."
"You're going to be the homewrecker everyone spits on."
"And don't bother dreaming that he'll divorce me and marry you in three years, because..."
She placed a hand on her stomach, her smile dripping with triumph.
"This baby is his flesh and blood."
I lowered my eyes to hide the tears that surged up without warning.
So Harrison really had betrayed me.
And he'd treated me like a fool, telling me to wait another three years.
I did the math. The baby in Claudia's belly would have been conceived the night Harrison didn't come home.
That was the first time he'd ever forgotten my birthday. He said he was out entertaining clients.
The next morning, he came back full of apologies.
And proposed to me.
Said he wanted to give me a fairy-tale wedding.
I'd waited eight years for that moment.
The joy crushed every last shred of unease in my heart.
But that night, he forgot to lock the bathroom door. When I walked in, I saw the scratches across his back.
Fresh scratches. I demanded to know what happened.
He answered without missing a beat. Said a cat scratched him.
Even pulled up his rabies vaccination record as proof.
I forced myself to believe it.
But a woman's intuition is a stubborn thing. Even while I was planning our wedding, none of it felt real.
A voice in the back of my mind kept whispering: He finally agreed to marry you because he's trying to make up for something he did.
I buried my head in the sand, too afraid to dig for the truth.
But I wasn't willing to let it go, either. So I started following him in secret.
When I discovered that his "client meetings" were actually visits to Claudia's apartment, I stopped confronting him. I just waited for him to come clean.
That was why I didn't push when he skipped the rehearsal.
That was why I said nothing when he texted me about getting legally married to Claudia at City Hall.
"Excuse me."
I had no interest in wasting words on Claudia. I just wanted to leave.
But the second Harrison stepped out with the first aid kit, she grabbed my hand and threw herself backward into the broken glass.
"Tilda, I know you don't like me, but why would you push me?"
"Ah! My stomach... my baby, it hurts..."
She held up her hand. Her palm was sliced open.
Harrison lunged forward, his face tight with panic and anguish.
"Claudia, don't be scared. I'm taking you to the hospital right now."
He scooped her up and bolted for the door.
Before he left, he turned and fixed me with a cold stare.
"Tilda, I never thought you could be this vicious. Attacking a pregnant woman? How heartless can you be?"
"If anything happens to her baby, there's no future for us. None."
I watched his back disappear through the doorway.
"There hasn't been a future for us in a long time," I whispered.
By the time I finished sweeping up the broken glass, the cut on my foot had already stopped bleeding on its own.
But the wound in my chest was still raw and open.
