Chapter 3
He caught my wrist harder than he meant to. "Do you know how many people came today? How are my parents supposed to face any of them after this?"
That landed on me like a bucket of ice water.
Even then, what he was thinking about was face.
Not what it had cost me to stand on that stage alone in a wedding dress.
Not what it had cost my mother to sit down there and listen to the whispers.
Not what it had cost me to watch a year of work get crushed in one afternoon.
What he thought about was where his parents were going to put their faces.
I pulled my fingers out of his hand one at a time.
"And where do I put mine?"
Charles froze.
"When I was up on that stage with two hundred people watching me, did it cross your mind even once to wonder what I was going through while you were with Lucy?"
His eyes flickered, like he was about to say something.
But I didn't give him the chance.
"Forget it. You don't need to think about it anymore. From now on, whatever happens to me is none of your business," I said.
With that, I gathered up my wedding dress and walked right past him.
He called out from behind me, "Evelyn!"
I didn't look back.
That night, I didn't go back to the apartment we were supposed to share.
Grace took me to her place instead.
She spent the whole ride roasting Charles, coming up with new insults every minute—forty minutes straight, not a single repeat.
'I just listened, feeling nothing at all,' I thought to myself.
When we got to Grace's place, she kicked a pair of slippers over to my feet, then went to start boiling some water. Halfway through, she rushed back and wrapped me in a tight hug.
"If you want to cry, cry. Don't hold it in," Grace said.
As she hugged me, my nose started to sting and I felt a lump in my throat.
But no tears came.
"Grace," I said, "I don't think I can cry anymore."
Her eyes welled up instantly.
"That's worse," she said.
Yeah.
It really is worse.
When the pain hits hardest, you just feel numb inside.
It was like a fist landing in the chest, where even breathing ran half a beat behind.
I sat on the couch, my phone buzzing nonstop.
Charles kept calling.
His mom called, too.
And Lucy called too.
I didn't answer any of them.
Later, Lucy sent me a voice message.
She said, "Evelyn, I'm so sorry. All of this is because of me. Charles was only worried about me, and I never meant to affect your wedding. Don't blame him. If you have to blame somebody, blame me."
Her voice was soft and thin and full of tears.
Once, I might have written back and told her to take care of herself.
Now all I felt was disgust.
I had the app transcribe it, read it, and block her.
Grace came over with hot water, saw how fast I had done it, and stopped.
"You finally cut her off?" Grace asked.
I stared at the steam curling up from my cup and gave a quiet nod.
"It's too late," she said.
I smiled. "Yeah, it's too late."
Early the next morning, I went to the apartment we were supposed to share.
Charles wasn't there.
He was probably at work, or maybe at the hospital. I didn't even bother to check.
It was a fourteen-hundred-square-foot three-bedroom, and I had overseen every inch of that renovation.
I picked the couch in the living room.
I assembled the plant stand on the balcony myself.
And I found that white dinnerware set in the kitchen after weekend upon weekend of walking through home stores.
I had imagined getting married in that apartment, having children there, and growing old there.
Looking at it now, all of it was a joke.
I pulled out my suitcase and started packing my things.
Clothes, skincare, my laptop, my files, my photo albums.
Somewhere in the middle of it, I found a bank transfer slip at the bottom of the nightstand drawer.
[Sender: Charles Reed]
[Recipient: Lucy Lane]
[Amount: 17 thousand dollars.]
Date was two weeks ago.
The memo field was blank.
I stood there, holding it for a long time until my fingertips went cold.
Two weeks earlier was exactly when we paid the final wedding balance and the deposit for the honeymoon hotel.
I had asked Charles at the time why the account was short.
He said the company needed a bridge for a few days, and he would put it back.
He did put it back later, so I didn't think much of it.
And only now did I understand that the money had never gone to his company.
It had gone into Lucy's account.
I sat down on the edge of the bed and laughed at myself.
I had been played, and played completely.
I photographed the slip and saved it to my phone.
Then I pulled out every receipt in that apartment with my money behind it.
The transfer for the down payment.
The receipts for the renovation materials.
The invoices for the appliances.
The deposit contracts for the wedding.
It came to a whole stack.
Grace stood in the doorway watching me sort it on the coffee table. "Evelyn, you don't look like somebody breaking up. You look like somebody building a case."
"That's exactly what I'm doing," I said.
Her eyes lit up. "So you finally figured it out?"
I slipped the last invoice into the folder and zipped it up.
"I'm not going to reason with him," I said. "I'm going to settle the account."
That afternoon, I met up with Max Dalton.
Max had been two years ahead of me in college, and he was the attorney my company had worked with for years.