I moved fast after that morning.
Not visibly fast. Not the kind of fast anyone would notice. I smiled at the right times and answered emails and let Dane pull me close on the couch while he watched football. But underneath all of it, I was moving.
The joint savings account was the first thing. I had my own account at a separate bank—had always kept it, out of habit, out of the particular self-sufficiency my father had built into me without meaning to. I transferred what was mine. Clean. Documented. Nothing that could be called theft, because it wasn't. It was arithmetic.
The one-way ticket to London came next. Morning flight, the day after the wedding. I booked it on my phone in the work bathroom with the door locked, and when the confirmation email landed in my inbox I felt something that wasn't quite relief and wasn't quite grief. More like the feeling of setting down something very heavy. Just for a second. Before picking it back up.
Naomi was harder.
We met at a place in Midtown she liked, small tables, loud enough that no one could overhear. She was already there when I arrived, coffee in hand, watching the door with the particular alertness of a woman who has spent a decade in corporate rooms reading people before they sit down.
"You look terrible," she said. "Beautifully terrible, but still."
"Thanks." I sat. I ordered water. "How's the Calloway account?"
"You didn't come here to talk about Calloway." She put her cup down. "What's going on?"
I had rehearsed this. I knew exactly how much to give her. Not everything—not yet. Just enough.
"I have reason to believe Dane has been unfaithful," I said. My voice was flat and even. "I'm handling it. But I need someone I trust to have access to the venue's AV system on the wedding day. Someone who can make sure a specific file gets played at a specific time."
Naomi went very still. Her eyes did the thing they always did when she was thinking fast—a slight narrowing, almost imperceptible.
"How specific?"
"Down to the minute."
She looked at me for a long moment. "You already have the file."
"Not yet."
"But you will."
"Yes."
Another pause. Then she picked up her coffee.
"Tell me what you need," she said.
Those four words again. My father. Now Naomi. I filed them somewhere I could reach later, when I needed them.
---
The boutique was on the Upper East Side. White walls, soft lighting, the kind of place that smelled like money and tuberose. The seamstress had been working on my gown for three months. It was ivory, structured at the bodice, with a skirt that moved when I walked.
Dane had insisted on coming.
He was good at it. That was the thing I kept having to remind myself. He was genuinely, effortlessly good at it. He adjusted my veil with both hands, tilting his head slightly like he was studying a painting he'd commissioned. He pressed his lips to my temple and murmured something about how he couldn't wait to see me walk toward him, and the seamstresses behind him exchanged the kind of glance women exchange when they think they're witnessing something real.
I smiled. I looked at my reflection in the wide mirror.
The woman looking back at me had a composed face and empty eyes.
"I'll just be a minute," I said, and stepped into the fitting room.
The curtain didn't quite close. A gap, maybe three inches, where the heavy fabric didn't meet the wall. I was reaching up to fix it when the mirror in the corridor caught the movement.
I stopped.
Dane had his back to the main room. Helena was against the wall behind a rack of garment bags, her dark hair loose, her face tipped up. His hand was at the small of her back, pulling. Her fingers were in his hair. They kissed the way people kiss when they've been waiting and can't wait anymore—consuming, graceless, without any of the performance he'd just put on for the seamstresses.
I stood very still.
My phone was in my hand. I'd been checking the time. My thumb moved without my fully deciding it—opened the camera, switched to video, held it steady through the gap in the curtain.
I watched the screen instead of the corridor. Easier that way. More manageable. The little red dot pulsed in the corner.
Helena pulled back first. She said something I couldn't hear. Dane laughed—low, private, the laugh I had thought was mine.
I stopped the recording. I checked the file. Clear audio, clear image. I airdropped it to myself, then to a cloud folder with a password only I knew.
Then I fixed the curtain, smoothed the skirt of my gown, and stepped back out into the light.
"What do you think?" I asked, turning toward the mirror.
Dane looked at me with warm eyes. "Perfect," he said. "Absolutely perfect."
"I think so too," I said.
I smiled at my reflection.
Naomi was going to need that file by Friday.
