My Fiancé Erased Me, Then Left Me for Dead novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Cropped Out
Melinda's foster sister posts the engagement photos without her, the two of them leave her alone on a desert trail, and a ranger finds her; her return flight has already been cancelled.
At breakfast, Shea posted our engagement photos, and I wasn't in a single one.
Jared was in all twelve.
So was Shea, tucked under his arm in front of the red rocks, smiling up at him.
I had been standing right behind the camera while she took them.
Her caption said: "Sedona, you've changed us."
I commented: "Where am I?"
Shea answered within a minute and tagged my name.
"You were in the way of the light, so I cropped you out."
She added a tongue-out face.
That same morning, at the wedding venue, the coordinator had shaken Shea's hand first and called her the bride.
Shea had squeezed Jared's arm and said thank you.
Jared had looked right at me and said nothing.
Then he had told me to step out of the shot, because I was throwing off the composition.
For fourteen months I had told myself that Shea just couldn't stop filming.
She had filmed the proposal from behind a planter.
Jared had asked me to say yes a second time, because her first take was shaky.
I had laughed and said yes again.
By the time I got back to the hotel, the post had hundreds of comments.
"Congratulations!" "You two look perfect together." "The wedding is going to be gorgeous."
Every one of them thought she was the bride.
I commented again: "I'm the bride."
The comment was gone in under a minute.
Then Shea sent three outtakes to our group chat, with my face circled in red.
"I didn't leave you out on purpose. You look like a hostage in photos, so I deleted all of them."
Jared replied with a laughing face.
I left the group chat.
I was still holding my phone when I heard them in the hall outside my room.
"I give her an hour, tops. Then she comes crying back."
"Half an hour. She's never walked away from anything."
They both laughed.
I pulled my suitcase out of the closet and started packing for the airport.
Jared pushed the door open before I had the zipper closed.
Shea came in behind him with her arms folded. "Over a few photos? It was a joke."
"Was deleting my comment a joke too?" I asked.
She rolled her eyes.
Jared reached out to ruffle my hair, and I flinched away.
He sighed, slow and patient. "Melinda, don't be so sensitive. You're making it awkward for everyone."
I picked up my suitcase. "Move."
Shea glanced at Jared, and the two of them smirked.
It was the same look that had shut me out of every private joke for fourteen months.
Jared took the suitcase out of my hand. "Fine. We'll drive you to the airport."
He didn't take the highway.
He turned onto a dirt road with nothing on it but scrub and heat.
"One last activity first," Shea said, holding up her phone. "We're filming a reaction video. It'll be quick."
The car stopped at the end of a trailhead.
Jared said a back tire looked soft and asked me to get out and check.
The second my door opened, Shea came around the car and pulled me toward the trail.
"Rules are simple. You walk to the overlook alone, and we time how long it takes you to break down."
I lunged for the car.
The engine started.
Shea leaned out of the passenger window with her camera on my face. "Smile. This is going to blow up."
"You know I can't take heat," I said, slapping the glass. "Give me my phone and my water."
Jared rolled the window up and hit the gas.
"We're getting iced coffee at the new café," he called. "You can enjoy nature."
The tires threw red dust over my shoes, and the car shrank to a dot in the shimmering heat.
It was noon, and over a hundred degrees.
I had walked fifteen minutes before my shirt was soaked and the edges of everything went white.
They knew heat made me faint, and they knew my phone was still charging on the dash.
This wasn't a joke.
They had left me out here to die.
I steadied myself on a rock wall, and my knees went anyway.
A park ranger on a bicycle stopped beside me. He crouched, put a bottle in my hands and asked if I needed an ambulance.
I drank half of it before I could say the name of the overlook.
He walked me there. Nobody was waiting, and the bench held no water and no sun jacket.
I borrowed his phone to open my account.
Shea's newest post showed her and Jared in an air-conditioned café with frosted drinks.
The caption said: "Waiting for someone to come to her senses."
I called Jared from the ranger's phone, and he said they'd be there in forty minutes.
They took longer.
When Shea climbed out of the car, she looked at her cup before she looked at me. "We waited so long our Frappuccinos melted."
Jared handed me a half-empty bottle of warm water without meeting my eyes.
"Drink that. And apologize to Shea before you get in. You scared her half to death, and then we're even."
I got into the car without saying anything.
They thought it meant I had swallowed it.
I opened the airline app to book a flight home, and my own return seat was gone, cancelled two days ago from Jared's account.
So I wasn't flying home.
I was going to take their wedding apart.
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