The Wedding He Stole Was My Great Escape novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: This Is the Call

Mireille takes Jasper's card, lets Greta clean her wrist, and posts the recording of the open call; by morning it has two million views and the Ackerly press team calls it an AI fake and sends her a threat.

"Wife," I said again. "She told everyone you were her ex."

"She tells everyone a lot of things," Jasper said.

He did not come any closer.

"I'm not asking you to believe me," he said. "I'm asking you to check one thing. Ask Lorna for her divorce decree."

"Why would I trust anything a stalker tells me?"

"You shouldn't," he said. "That's why I said check."

My phone showed two percent.

I called the one number I knew by heart that wasn't my parents'.

"Greta," I said. "I'm behind the Ackerly Grand, and I need a ride."

"Don't move," Greta said. "I'm in the car already. I saw the stream."

She hung up before I could say more.

Jasper took a card from his coat and held it out.

MacAvoy Marine Repair, Red Hook, with a phone number.

I didn't take it.

He set it on the milk crate between us and stepped back.

"They'll say you made it up by morning," he said. "Do you have anything besides that page?"

I thought of the voice memo, and I said nothing.

"If you do, post it tonight," he said. "Before their lawyers wake up."

A dented Subaru swung into the alley with its high beams on.

Greta jumped out in her blue scrubs and ran straight at me.

"Oh my God, your arm."

She looked at the man in the gray coat and put herself between us.

"Who is he?"

"Nobody," I said.

"She's right," Jasper said. "I'm nobody."

He opened the passenger door of the Subaru for me, because Greta's hands were full of my arm.

His fingers closed over the top edge of the door, and for a second they rested next to my shoulder.

His hand was warm, with a ridge of old scars across the knuckles.

"Soap and water on that cut," he said. "Not alcohol."

"I'm a nurse," I said.

"Then do what you'd tell a patient."

He closed the door, and he did not look back.

Greta drove with both hands tight on the wheel.

"That's the stalker from the stream," she said. "He talked to you."

"He gave me a card."

"Throw it out."

I had picked it up off the crate without noticing.

It was in my fist next to the schedule.

I put it in my bag.

Greta's apartment was a fourth-floor walk-up in Bushwick, with a futon and a lot of plants.

She sat me on the kitchen counter, ran the cut under the faucet, and swore for the whole minute it took.

"There's still glass in this," she said, and went in with tweezers.

I did not flinch.

I had stopped flinching at some point between the bridge and the loading dock.

"Tell me everything," Greta said.

I told her everything.

I told her about the schedule and the locked doors and the open call on the speakers.

When I got to the part where my father said we could always give Mireille another wedding later, Greta put the tweezers down.

"They said that," she said. "Out loud."

"I have it recorded."

She stared at me.

"Nearly four minutes," I said. "All four of their voices."

"Mireille."

"I know."

"Post it," she said, and her eyes were wet. "Post it right now."

I took the dead phone and plugged it in beside the toaster.

It took four minutes to wake up.

The voice memo was still there, saved at 3:51 that afternoon.

I played it once with the volume low.

Tobias said, She won't make it to the ceremony.

Preston said, Good.

My father said, We can always give Mireille another wedding later.

I listened to my mother say, Mireille is strong, she'll understand.

Greta cried.

I did not.

I typed one line under the file and nothing else.

I was locked in this car for four hours. This is the call.

My thumb sat over the button.

My parents would never forgive me for this.

I pressed Post anyway.

At 2 a.m. Greta made me eat toast.

At 3 a.m. she put me in her bed and slept on the futon.

I lay in the dark with my phone face down on my chest, feeling it buzz and buzz.

At six I turned it over.

The recording had two million views.

The comments were a wall.

They locked her in the car.

Her own mother said "she'll understand."

Somebody had already found Lorna's page and filled it with comments.

Tobias had made his account private.

My phone rang, and the screen said Ackerly Hotels Communications.

I let it ring out.

A text arrived a minute later from an unknown number.

Ackerly Hotels states the audio posted overnight is an AI-generated fake, made by an unstable ex-fiancée. Legal action is being prepared.

Under it, one more line:

We know where you're staying, Ms. Fairbanks.

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