My Power Showed Me His Cheating An Hour Earlier novel · Chapter 32 of 32
Chapter 32: Something Old
I sat down on the stool by the register.
I opened the envelope the way my mother opened mail, with one finger along the fold.
Inside was a square of pattern paper, folded twice.
One line, in her handwriting.
"I said pretend I'm holding your hand. Don't pretend. I am."
I read it four times.
Then I held it against my chest, and I didn't cry, because the makeup was half done and Maggie would kill me.
I cried a little anyway.
The restorer patted my shoulder once and went out to the yard to find a seat.
Maggie put the veil on me at three o'clock.
She stood behind me at the mirror in the cooler door.
She set the comb in my hair very gently, with her tongue between her teeth.
White silk. Tiny pearls. Silk roses all the way around the edge.
My mother's last month, every petal.
The letter was folded small and tucked inside my dress, against my ribs.
"Something old," Maggie said.
"Something old."
"Something new is the ring. Something blue is Wells's face when he sees you."
She sniffed hard. "Something borrowed is me. I'm lending you my brother. No returns."
"You're doing returns?"
"No returns," she said, and hugged me so hard my veil slid.
Nobody walked me down the aisle.
I'd decided that in January.
The veil would do it. That was what it was for.
At three thirty, the harp man started to play.
I came out through the back door of my shop into the yard.
The yard was full.
The street behind it was full too, all the way to the corner.
People stood on the sidewalk and on stoops and on the hardware man's step stool.
Wells had been right. They all came.
The Monday lady was in the front row in her church cardigan with a yellow rose in her lap.
The tattoo girls and their mother. The coffee place, the whole staff in aprons.
The woman from the corner desk at the bank, already crying. She'd told me June was her worst month.
The detective, in his brown suit, with a small granddaughter on his knee.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–16 of My Power Showed Me His Cheating An Hour Earlier are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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