“Harley, it isn’t like that,” I stammer. My hands are shaking so hard I have to clench them into fisted balls at my sides.
“It is.” She looks from me to Amanda, her gaze a clinical assessment of our collective failure. “She planned your wedding twice. Unfortunately for both of you, this is her second time planning a broken engagement.”
“This is highly inappropriate,” my mother says, her voice trembling with the effort to maintain the Thompson veneer.
Harley ignores her. She’s looking at Amanda, and I see a flicker of something pass between them with terrifying, wide-eyed clarity.
Harley reaches for her left hand. I watch, paralyzed, as she tugs at the emerald. It’s stubborn, catching on her knuckle, a final piece of the shackle refusing to let go. When it finally slides off, she takes my hand. She pries my fingers open—I’m too weak to resist—and places the ring we once loved in my palm.
“Your mother wanted silver,” she whispers. The words are only for me, a final, biting intimacy. “She got it. I hope it’s enough to keep you warm.”
“Harley, please,” I stammer, my voice breaking. I reach for her, a pathetic, desperate grab for the life I’m losing. “I love you. I’m doing this for us.”
“No, you’re doing this for you, Skyler. Now you don’t have to choose because I’m making the choice for you.”
And then, she turns.
She doesn’t run. I wish she would run. Because if she ran, then I could interpret it as an impulse she might regret later. Regret means she’ll apologize and I’ll take her back, but she doesn’t. She calmly walks.
I watch the white silk of her train glide over the carpet. The guests are a blur of high fashion silhouettes pulling back as she passes, as if her independence might be contagious. I see Bill Davis, the Hendersons. Their judgment is a physical weight, pressing down on my shoulders until I can’t breathe.
I glance to the back of the room where Jake Matthews stands. It’s then I realize he hadn’t walked his daughter down the aisle because he would never give her away to me. He isn’t wearing a tuxedo, and his tie is crooked, but he looks like a king. In his hand, he’s clutching a splintered piece of cedar.
And as I watch the white silk retreat down the aisle, it’s the most beautiful and terrible thing I’ve ever seen. I want to move. I want to run after her, to grab her, to tell her I’ll burn the house down. I’ll leave the firm.
I’ll do anything.
But I can’t. My legs have turned to water. The Thompson spine, the structural column of my identity, has finally buckled.
I collapse.
My knees hit the altar steps with a thud that vibrates through my bones. I am a heap of expensive wool on a floor that costs more than a mortgage. I watch her back as she nears the doors. She doesn’t look back. She doesn’t hesitate. She walks out of the mahogany tomb and into the rain.
The doors close. Thud.
The ballroom erupts. It’s a sea of whispers, gasps, and the sharp sound of my mother’s chair scraping the floor.
“Skyler!” Elaine is there, her hand on my shoulder, her voice hissing in my ear. “Get up! You are making a scene! Robert, do something!”
I don’t look at her. I look at the floor. The parquet is polished to a mirror finish. I can see my reflection in it—distorted, warped, a man in a tuxedo with no soul.
I look up, my vision blurred by tears that feel like acid. I see my father standing over me, his face a mask of disgust. I see Amanda, still sitting there, looking at me like I’m a ghost she’s finally stopped mourning.
And then I see it.
A single, broken piece of cedar on the floor. It must have fallen from Jake’s hand when they walked out the door. A splinter of the world Harley wanted. I want to reach out and touch it.
I am a thirty-year-old man on his knees at a country club. I have the ring. I have the firm. I have the Thompson name.
But I have absolutely nothing.
The weight of it—the realization that I traded the only thing that made me human for a seat at table seven—finally crushes the last of my breath. I stay there, head bowed, while the lilies continue to smell like a funeral. My funeral. My life, my integrity, my future, all shredded like a gold-embossed gift card,leaving behind only the cold, silver silence of a man who finally realized he was a puppet far too late to cut the strings.
Chapter 18
Skyler
The blue light of my phone is the only thing with any pulse in this room.
