The Wedding That Never Happened Because He Loved Someone Else

Two years out of state, buried in Don Marchetti's clean operations in Lunaria, and I cut my time short. I came home to Solaria with my heart already half-dressed for the union ceremony, eager to seal the blood-bound betrothal that had been arranged before either of us was old enough to understand what a vow cost.

While I was setting up the rooms of the house we were meant to share, I found them. Hidden in the false bottom of his desk drawer, pressed flat and preserved with a care he had never once shown me, were the stubs. Hundreds of them. Travel papers, private flights, every receipt logged like tribute. My betrothed of ten years, Lorenzo Falcone, had been crossing into out-of-state territory at least once a month.

And not one of those trips had been to see me.

Even though I had been a hundred kilometers from where he kept landing, close enough to feel the same cold off the water, close enough that he could have driven to me between sit-downs and never bothered.

I arrived early at the place he had chosen to make his promise to me, the gathering where two bloodlines were supposed to be bound in front of the whole community. I came to surprise him. Instead I found him already down on one knee in the rose-light, making his promise to someone else.

"Bianca Vitale, will you marry me? The moment you say yes, I'll switch brides. I swear it."

His face was lifted to her, lit up with a hope I had never once earned from him in ten years. And I could not make my feet carry me one step closer.

Since I was not the woman he wanted at his side for the rest of his life, I decided I might as well let them have their ceremony.

But after I walked away, he crossed territory lines and water and borders, hunting the whole world over to drag me back.

——

The site had been dressed in roses, drowned in the warm gold of soft lamplight. Romantic. Intimate. Exactly the kind of staging I had imagined for myself more times than I would ever admit to anyone, in the dark, when I still believed the betrothal meant something.

Lorenzo, on one knee, was the precise image of the moment I had dreamed of a thousand times.

But the woman standing over him was not me.

"Bianca, will you marry me?"

Bianca pressed one hand over her mouth, her shoulders trembling with a performance she had clearly rehearsed, and reached for the roses with the other. A diamond caught the light as he slid the betrothal stone onto her finger, throwing sparks across the petals.

They folded into each other and kissed, slow and certain, like people who had done it many times before. Their whispers drifted to me on the wind, soft and pleased and utterly private.

I realized my own thumb was working at the matching ring he had sent me from out of state, the twin to the one now glittering on her hand.

I had never told him the ring was too big for me.

To keep it from sliding off, I had wound half a loop of red thread beneath it, the way my mother once taught me to make a dead woman's jewelry fit a living hand. A small, secret thing. A repair he never noticed because he never looked.

Perhaps after all this time the thread had simply worn thin. When I tugged at it without thinking, it came undone in my fingers.

The ring, freed from the thread that had held it in place, slipped from my hand in an instant and rolled away across the stone, vanishing down a distant drain in the dark.

Just like Lorenzo, who had spent two years out of state and come back no longer bound to me by anything at all.

A ring that does not fit is not worth chasing into the gutter. Neither is a man who never loved you. I pressed my thumb to the bare spot where the ring had been and smoothed the empty skin once, slow, the way I always did when something inside me had already finished breaking and had begun, very quietly, to decide.

"Lorenzo," I said, low enough that the night nearly swallowed it. "I hope your wedding goes exactly as you've planned."

But it was not me he answered. It was her voice that came back, light and teasing in the gold light.

"Why? You're the only one I want to marry," he told her.

"Because," Bianca purred, turning the largest stone on her hand inward against her palm, hiding the gleam of it as if some instinct already knew the night might name it stolen, "I'm going to crash your wedding. That way the whole community will see how truly you're in love with me."

My feet stopped moving on their own.

Because I was suddenly, sickeningly curious to learn just how far Lorenzo would go to wound me for the sake of this woman.

"You little terror," he laughed, the sound warm and indulgent. "Only you could dream up something that reckless."

"Then I'd better keep an extra pair of running shoes ready," she said, "so I can run faster when we make our escape together."

"And you're truly willing to do this to Adriana?"

There it was. My name, spoken between them like a small inconvenience to be stepped around.

"Marrying her to honor the promise is already the most I'm prepared to give," Lorenzo said, and somewhere under the charm of it I heard the man he really was. "If she can't keep her own husband from being carried off at the altar, that's hardly something she can lay at my feet, is it?"

He laughed before he had finished the lie, a half-beat too soon, and reached up to touch the knot of his tie as though it needed straightening. It did not. It was already perfect. It always was. That small, useless gesture was the only honest thing about him, and I had learned to read it years ago.

Their laughter rose together, bright and easy, and it went into me like a blade slid between the ribs by a familiar hand.

I turned away and put my back against the cold trunk of a tree at the edge of the light, my legs gone so weak beneath me that I could not have crossed the distance to him if my life had depended on it.

So I did not try. I folded my hands in front of me, one over the bare spot where his ring used to sit, and I stood very still in the dark while the man I had bankrolled out of nothing went on making his promises to someone else.