Jilted at the Altar, I Married His Billionaire Uncle novel · Chapter 31 of 32
Chapter 31: Three Hundred Ironworkers
The union hall had never looked like that in its life.
My partner and six women from the job had spent two days on it.
White lights strung along every steel truss in the ceiling.
Folding chairs in rows, three hundred of them, with a strip of white ribbon on every one.
The old gang box from thirty-eight, dented and all, stood at the front, covered in a tablecloth, for the rings.
The jilt jar sat on the gang box too.
A new one. Somebody had relabeled it.
FOR A BETTER DRESS.
It had paid for this one.
Ivory, long sleeves, plain as a good weld.
My partner had found it and made me try it on in a store at the mall while she cried in the dressing room chair.
I wore my good boots under it.
Nobody could see them. I knew they were there.
"You ready?" my father said in the back hallway.
He had on a new gray suit with his union pin on the lapel.
He'd shaved twice. He still had a nick on his chin.
"I've been married to him for seven months, Dad."
"That one didn't count. I wasn't there." He held out his arm. "This one I'm walking you."
The music started. A fiddle and a guitar, two brothers from a raising gang downtown.
The doors opened.
Three hundred ironworkers stood up.
Every chair in that hall.
Hard hats on their laps, or under their arms, or on their heads, because some of them had never been to a wedding without one.
The business agent who'd banged the gavel for me in May. The foreman from the night shift, in a tie. Men who'd known my grandfather.
My gang, in the front row.
The old connector in his one good sport coat.
The apprentice, already crying.
The operator, who nodded at me once like it was a clean pick.
And at the very back, in the last row on the end, Kaylee.
She was holding her daughter on her lap in a little white dress.
The chairs on both sides of her were full.
My partner's husband on one side. A big welder from the North Side on the other, making faces at the baby.
Kaylee looked up at me as I passed.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–16 of Jilted at the Altar, I Married His Billionaire Uncle are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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