"My parents?—"
"I'll text your mom from the car. Come on, Charlie."
They left through a service exit Kate found by asking a hotel staffer. Down a freight elevator, through a kitchen, out a loading dock into an alley where Kate had parked her ancient Toyota that morning. Charlotte folded herself into the passenger seat. The dashboard was cluttered with coffee cups, school parking passes and a stuffed animal one of Kate's students had given her. Normal things. Small things. Charlotte picked up the stuffed animal: a frog, matted and well-loved, and held it in her lap.
Kate drove. She didn't ask where. She just drove.
Charlotte pressed her forehead against the window. The glass was cool. The city moved past her. Buildings, people, traffic, all of it the same city she'd woken up in that morning when she was a woman about to get married, and now she was something else. She didn't have a word for what she was now.
"Who is Jacqueline?" she asked. Her voice was flat. Scraped clean.
Kate was quiet for too long.
"Kate."
"I don't know. Not for sure." Kate's hands flexed on the steering wheel. "There was a woman. At the rehearsal dinner. Dark hair. She came with a date — a husband, I think. I saw Dominic look at her and I thought — I didn't know what I thought. I told myself I was projecting."
"You didn't tell me."
"What was I going to say? 'Hey, Charlie, your fiancé made eye contact with a brunette, maybe don't marry him'? I didn'tknowanything."
Charlotte closed her eyes. Kate was right. And it didn't matter. Because Charlotte had seen things too. Small things, edge-of-vision things, things she'd chosen to explain away because the alternative was unbearable. And now the alternative was sitting in her lap like a dead weight, and she couldn't explain it away anymore.
Kate's apartment was a walk-up in Astoria. Third floor, no elevator, narrow stairwell that smelled like someone's cooking. Charlotte climbed the stairs in Kate's sweatshirt and her bare feet, carrying the stuffed frog. She sat on Kate's couch while Kate made tea she didn't want and brought her a blanket she didn't need.
"Do you want to talk about it?"
"No."
"Do you want to be alone?"
"No."
Kate sat next to her. Close, not touching. Present.
Charlotte stared at the wall. Her mind was doing something she couldn't control — replaying everything. The courtship. The proposal. The nights she'd lain next to him, pressed her face into his shoulder and thoughtI am the luckiest woman alive.Had any of it been real? Had he ever looked at her and seen Charlotte, or had she always been a placeholder? A suitable woman in a suitable dress saying suitable vows while he stood there with someone else's name loaded in his mouth?
She thought about her vows. The ones she'd written at her desk during recess.I choose you, Dominic. Today and tomorrow and every day I'm lucky enough to get.
She'd meant every word. She'd opened her chest and handed him everything inside it. He’d taken it, and then he'd said another woman's name.
The tears came. These were ugly — gasping, airless, making her whole body convulse. She pressed her face into the blanket and sobbed. Kate put a hand on her back and held it there. Charlotte cried until there was nothing left.
When she stopped, the apartment was dark. Kate had turned the lights off at some point. The city hummed outside the window.
"Was any of it real?" Charlotte whispered.
Kate didn't answer. Which was answer enough.
CHAPTER 5
DOMINIC
The aisle was empty.
Dominic stood at the altar, watching the doors close behind Charlotte and Kate. His first thought, the very first thing that crossed his mind, before the guilt, before the shame, before anything resembling human feeling was:How do I fix this?
The ballroom had erupted into noise that only happens when hundreds of well-dressed people are trying to react to a catastrophe without appearing to react to a catastrophe. A low hum of whispered conversations, chairs creaking, someone's phone already buzzing. The string quartet had long stopped playing. The officiant was standing at the altar holding his book open to a page they would never finish, looking at Dominic with an expression that fell somewhere between professional concern and undisguised horror.
