She Heard Her Dead Fiancé's Voice Through the Groom's Door at a Wedding She Was Working
"You don't belong at my son's wedding." The words landed with an open palm across her cheek, and every seated guest heard the crack of it.
Wren Calloway had come to the venue that morning with buckets of pale-pink roses and a bridal bouquet she'd wired herself at dawn. Three months ago she buried the man she was supposed to marry. Three minutes ago she heard his voice through the groom's-room door.
She took the job because the money was real and the grief was expensive. Now she was standing in a reception hall in a black work shirt with a florist badge on a lanyard, holding the bouquet she'd built for a bride whose name she didn't know, and the groom's mother was walking toward her with her chin up like a woman who had rehearsed this.
The palm came across Wren's right cheek fast and dry. Her head turned left. A thin red line bloomed under the chandelier light, and Wren's hand went up to it on instinct, and the room went very quiet behind the string lights.
Sylvia Ferris smoothed her jacket cuffs the way she always did before she told a lie.
"You don't belong at my son's wedding."
Wren pressed the heel of her hand to her sternum and kept her feet. She'd stood in the rain at a closed casket while this woman held her elbow and whispered that it was God's timing. There was no time in the ground. There was never a body.
"Leave before I have you removed."
Renata's phone buzzed twice against her palm from the staging table. Not now, Wren thought. Not yet. She still had one thing left to finish.
Then her eyes went down to Sylvia's left wrist — the cream rose, the loop of grey ribbon, the side-knot she tied that morning with her own two hands. The blue ink at the knot. Her initials. W.S.
She lifted Sylvia's wrist and turned it toward the guests.
"This ribbon is mine. From this morning."
Nobody moved. Somewhere behind the rows of white chairs a woman said oh, softly, out loud.
And then the groom's-room door opened on the left wall, and a man in a charcoal three-piece suit stepped into the doorway fixing his tie, and Wren's mouth closed because she had no air left to say his name with. Dale Ferris. Alive. In the suit he bought for their wedding. His mother's corsage in his hand like a small cream accusation. He touched his tie knot, once, the way he did whenever he was afraid.
Somebody in the back row stood up.
The celebration stopped mid-veil. The bride hadn't turned around yet. She was still holding the bouquet Wren made, and she was about to ask the man at the altar a question nobody in that room was ready to hear answered.
What happens when the bride finds out the groom is legally dead?
Follow for the next chapter — where the bride learns the truth, and where the mother answers for it.
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