Thirty
Becca
It’s the final day of filming, and with as insane and emotional and devastating as all of this has been, I should be weeping with joy that it will soon be over. Well, at least until the finale I’m contractually obligated to attend.
I’m beyond done, ready to go home and try to scrape myself out of this emotional pit. But even though I know Nate and I are no longer a possibility, it hurts so much to think that, other than maybe at the finale in a couple months, I’ll never see him again.
That’s the real reason I’ve stayed. I told myself so many stories about why, but it’s all perfectly clear now to me, the excuses stripped away. I stayed for him. I stayed because deep down, I knew that he hadn’t betrayed me, and that he did have feelings for me. Because no matter how much I pushed him away out of fear, I couldn’t fully leave him.
It’s time to let him go, though—to let him move on and find someone who makes him truly happy, who can be everything good and right that he deserves. Someone who would never hurt him like I did.
There’s a part of me that regrets that I wasn’t brave enough there in the airport to tell him that I’m in love with him. By the end, though, I knew I’d succeeded in pushing him away for good. I couldn’t keep the painful truth about my in-laws from bursting out—selfish though it was to tell him all that, when he clearly wanted me gone. But it felt even more selfish to share the depth of my feelings for him, to put him in the position of having to tell me that he hadn’t felt that strongly. Or to tell me that he had, but he knows now that I’m not the one for him.
He was confused, he said, caught up in the show. But he definitely seemed to have figured out that he’s better off without me and the mess I am.
Which is probably true, no matter how much I wish otherwise.
The limo taking me to the official proposal location pulls to a stop, and I take a deep breath. Just a few more minutes and this will be over.
All of it.
“You’ll go down the steps,” Olivia says from next to me. “And we’ll do one last hair and makeup check, then Swiss will ask if you’re ready, and you’ll go to meet Preston. Got it?” She eyes me like she’s not sure if she’s going to have to repeat these directions.
I may be exhausted from yet another full day of travel getting from Ireland to here in Sicily, but I can remember how to walk and stand. “Got it.”
The limo door is opened for me and I adjust my gown enough to step out into the bright sunlight of Southern Italy. We’re right at the top of an amphitheater full of picturesque ruins and Roman columns.The whole thing is at the edge of this gorgeous cliff overlooking the sea.
It would be an incredible place to be proposed to, but I’m glad that’s not going to happen to me.
I hold up the skirts of my dress as I walk down the long path of stone steps into the amphitheater. Inside it, the crew is bustling around, sound people and camera people and producers readying themselves for the show’s climax. It’s very possible I’m the first one of the girls here, though I suppose I could be second and either Madison or Addison have already gone and been rejected. I’m guessing they’ll save the actual proposal for last.
I wonder which one of them Preston will choose. Since the DallianceTower night, when it was clear to both of us that it wasn’t going to be me, I’ve considered just bowing out entirely before even getting here. But I know how the show would portray that—they’d find every way possible to make it look like Preston is shocked and devastated by this, when he would definitely not be. And I feel like I owe it to him to let him do the rejecting and not have whoever he proposes to question whether she was only picked by default.
Of the two of them, I kind of hope he picks Addison. Maybe without Madison around to constantly bitch about, she could be a reasonably decent person.
I make it to the bottom of the steps, and, as directed, stand there while my hair is fussed over and my forehead is blotted free of the sweat from the heat.
The makeup artist takes a step back and surveys her work, then smiles. “You look gorgeous.”
I think she might actually be right.They already did a full round of hair and makeup back at the hotel, and I was shocked at how they were able to cover up the dark circles under my eyes and make me look like I haven’t been a zombie for the last several weeks.
Instead, in this incredible long, white, empire-waist dress stitched with swirls of gold embroidery, I look like an actual bride on her wedding day, going out to stand there on the coast with the man of her dreams. Except that, as I saw in the mirror earlier, my blue eyes look empty, as lifeless as I am inside.
“You really do,” a man’s voice says, and my heart suddenly kicks in, like it just remembered how to beat again.
I turn around and there’s Nate, the actual man of my dreams.
“Thank you.” I’m surprised I’m able to form words, given that I don’t feel like I can breathe. He’s so incredibly handsome, his smile gentle, if sad. It’s a good thing the makeup artist and hairstylist both left and no one’s standing close by us, seeing me look at him like this. Reading the loss on my face.
“You’re supposed to put this on now,” he says, holding out one of the “glass slippers.”This one isn’t actually glass, since I’m going to be walking up to the proposal location in it, and I imagine real glass shoes aren’t the best for hoofing it more than a few feet.
Whoever gets proposed to, though, will get an actual glass slipper, which Preston will kneel down and slide onto their foot, in lieu of a ring. Madison, Addison, and I all had to get fitted for these things, so that Preston can say something cheesy like “The slipper fits!” and it actually will.
My throat closes up seeing Nate holding this shoe out like that, a shoe that looks so much like the actual glass slipper. Choosing me out of all these beautiful women.
Except that he did, didn’t he? And I made him think I chose someone else, when really I just chose to hunker down in my fear and self-protection.
I take the shoe from him, and slip off my normal heels, then put this one on. It’s not super comfortable, but I don’t have very far to go. At the end of the path, up a small rise of stairs, there’s a dais framed with an arch formed by the ruins and columns. Beyond that arch is the dark blue of the sea and light blue of the sky. Up on that dais stands Preston, getting his hair and makeup done, too.
