The Life I Chose novel · Chapter 5 of 24

Chapter 5: The Invoices

I looked down at her.

The whole room was listening, and she knew it, and she didn't care.

"I'd rather owe it," I said.

"You'll change your mind."

"I'll owe it out loud," I said. "Every penny. Everyone in Providence will know whose wedding it was."

I walked out with her folder under my arm.

I didn't cry in the car.

I sat in it and called the hotel, the band, the florist, the caterer and the planner, one after the other, and asked each of them to email me a final invoice.

Then I texted the number on the wine label.

"You said you'd let me know what you won."

He wrote back in under a minute.

"Dinner. Not tonight. You've got a wedding to not have."

I laughed in my car outside a club full of rich women.

On Monday morning, Ruthie and I walked into Thackery Properties at nine sharp.

The firm takes up the whole fourth floor of a building on Westminster Street that Holt's father built in 1994.

It's one big open room, glass offices around the edge, forty desks in the middle.

Everyone who works there had been invited to my wedding.

Every head came up.

"Hi," I said to the receptionist. "Is Holt in?"

She looked at the glass office in the corner and then at me.

"He's... in a meeting."

Through the glass, Holt was alone at his desk, eating a bagel.

"Great," I said. "I'll wait."

I didn't sit down.

I opened my folder on the reception counter.

"Hotel ballroom and reception, thirty-one thousand five hundred," I read out, at the volume I use to call last orders. "Nonrefundable after September first."

Somebody at the nearest desk stopped typing.

"Band, six thousand. Florist, eight thousand two hundred. Caterer for the rehearsal dinner Holt didn't attend, nine thousand four hundred."

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