Chapter 2

Twelve minutes later, Adrian rushed back into the ballroom.

By then, I had taken off my wedding dress and changed into the black rehearsal clothes I'd worn that morning.

He found me near the service hallway while I was handing compensation envelopes to the hotel manager.

"What are you doing?" he snapped.

"Reimbursing the guests who traveled in, canceling the honeymoon suite, and having every wasted wedding expense billed to your mother."

His eyes dropped to my clothes.

As if me taking off the dress was harder for him to accept than abandoning me at the altar.

"Put the dress back on. Camille was having a panic attack. She wasn't thinking clearly. The veil was just a stupid joke."

"It was my veil."

"It's a piece of fabric, Nora."

I almost laughed.

I had spent eight months sewing silver stars along the edge of that veil, one by one.

My mother used to call me her little girl of midnight.

Adrian knew that.

He had been beside me at three in the morning when I finished the last row of stars.

At least, I had thought he was watching me.

Maybe he had only happened to be in the same room.

"You're right," I said calmly. "It's only fabric. So it isn't hard to give up."

His jaw tightened.

"What about our wedding?"

"That isn't hard to give up either."

For one second, the certainty on his face disappeared.

Then Camille stepped out from behind him.

She was pale and trembling, wrapped in a borrowed coat.

She had taken off my veil, but one of the silver hairpins I had sewn into it was still caught beside her ear.

"Nora, I'm sorry," she said softly. "I really wasn't myself. I saw the veil in Adrian's car, and I couldn't stop thinking about... about what it would feel like to be happy."

I walked up to her and pulled the silver pin from her hair.

"Now you know."

"Happiness is taking something that belongs to another woman and making her watch."

Tears filled Camille's eyes almost instantly.

Adrian stepped in front of her.

"That's enough."

Those two words were enough to kill whatever hope I had left.

He didn't ask if I was hurt.

He didn't apologize for leaving the wedding.

He didn't even glance at the torn veil lying on the ballroom floor.

All he cared about was that Camille was crying.

I held out the velvet box containing the wedding ring.

"Take her home."

"You always do anyway."

Adrian didn't take it.

"You're angry. That's all. Go back to the apartment tonight. We'll talk tomorrow."

"There is no tomorrow for us."

He gave a cold laugh.

"We've been together six years. You're not ending everything over one bad night."

"No."

"I'm ending it because every night before this convinced you I would never leave."

I set the ring box on the hood of his car, turned, and walked away.

Elise drove me to the old dance studio my mother had left me.

It had been closed for three years.

Dust covered the mirrors, the wooden floor had lost its shine, and a faded poster still hung by the entrance.

MIDNIGHT SWAN - Choreography by Nora Hale.

It was the production I had abandoned after its opening night.

Adrian hadn't come to the premiere.

Camille had found an old photograph, had an emotional breakdown, and said she couldn't be alone.

My mother sat in the front row with an oxygen tube hidden beneath her scarf and watched the entire show.

She died twelve days later.

After the funeral, Adrian told me married life would be too busy for me to keep rehearsing.

In the end, he convinced me to lock the doors.

I hadn't been back in three years.

Elise opened the door and asked quietly, "Are you really staying here tonight?"

I ran my hand over the dust-covered barre.

"I should have come back a long time ago."

At midnight, Adrian sent me seventeen messages in a row.

The last one said: Stop punishing me. I'll pick you up in the morning.

I blocked his number.

Then I turned on the studio lights.

One mirror after another came alive under the lights.

For the first time in years, I saw myself in the mirror without Adrian standing beside me.

Then my phone vibrated.

At 12:17 a.m., Judith released the Cole family's first official statement.

[The bride suffered an emotional episode. The wedding has been postponed until she recovers.]

They erased the groom who had walked out.

Then they rewrote me as the unstable woman who ruined her own wedding.