The bus rocked along and passed the intersection where I'd first met Sebastian.
Back then I'd fainted right here from low blood sugar, and he was the one who carried me into the shade, went and bought me water, bought me chocolate.
Afterward I thanked him over and over and tried to give him money, but all he wanted was my number. Then came the kind of pursuit no one could hold out against.
I once mentioned some dessert shop on my feed, just in passing, and he ordered from it for our whole department for an entire quarter.
Because I liked flowers, a fresh bouquet showed up at the front desk every single day.
It wasn't that I never wavered. But a coworker told me the watch on his wrist was a Patek Philippe Nautilus.
A number my whole family, sold off together, still couldn't have paid for.
So I brought him home. I told him about my background, about my parents.
He didn't say a word. He just turned and walked out the door, and something in me eased even as I couldn't help sinking.
But ten minutes later he was back, holding a new light bulb.
"I saw the kitchen bulb was burnt out. It's hard for your mom and dad to change it, so I'll do it."
The kitchen light came on. And looking into his eyes, mine lit up too.
He took my hand and said, "You're the only one I care about. Your background, what people think, none of it can touch that."
So why had it come to this?
I clutched the hem of my wedding gown. For a moment there I really had believed happiness was mine.
The scenery slid backward fast outside the window, and then that street corner was gone for good.
I was still lost in it when a friend sent me a message and a video.
"Mona, why isn't the bride you?"
My hands shook as I opened it, and there was Sebastian, arm in arm with Beatrice, moving through the guests to toast them.
Every so often he leaned in and murmured to her with a smile, telling her what to call each person who came up.
When they hit a guest she didn't know, he'd smooth it over with a laugh and tell her who the person was.
My eyes stung before I knew it, and I closed them with something dead settling in my chest.
Just last week, Sebastian had sent me all the guest information.
Eighty tables at the reception. He'd left exactly one for my friends.
And nearly eight hundred names on the Henson guest list, which I was supposed to have memorized within a week.
So that the moment I saw someone, I could rattle off whose husband he was, whose child.
When I flat out said I couldn't, Sebastian blew up at me.
"Marrying you is already enough of an embarrassment to the Henson family. Can you please not make things harder for me? These are the Hensons' relatives and business partners. My mother isn't giving you a hard time on purpose. If you want to marry into this family, the least you can do is show her you mean it."
In that moment whatever fight was left in me went out, and I just stared, numb, at my parents happily picking out their formal clothes.
Marrying up feels like swallowing needles. But if it set my parents at ease, if they'd stop feeling guilty for being a burden to me.
A grievance that size, I could bear.
What I didn't expect was that the day Sebastian and I went to pick up the wedding gown, we'd run into one of the Henson guests.
Sebastian pulled me over to say hello, but he wouldn't tell me how I was supposed to address the man, and he wouldn't let me ask either.
He just watched, cold-eyed, as my face went from red to white, nothing like the way he'd gently introduced each guest to Beatrice.
In the end it was the guest who stepped in himself and said his name was Owens, which was the only thing that spared me.
After we'd said our goodbyes, I couldn't hold it back and cried in the car, and Sebastian asked me irritably, "Did you even try? Why can Beatrice know all of them?"
But he never once mentioned that the Hensons and the Gilberts went back generations, that their circles overlapped completely.
Everything from these past weeks sat on my chest like a knot of gloom that wouldn't lift.
All these years of good times and sunk cost, my parents' hopes of seeing me settled, all of it had kept me from letting Sebastian go.
But now all I felt for him was weariness and numbness.
And when I casually opened the second video my friend had sent, the last thread in my head called reason finally snapped.
