Her Wedding Dress novel · Chapter 5 of 24

Chapter 5: Only Cloth

The reception was in the ballroom I had spent four months planning.

Round tables, white roses, a string quartet, and a banner over the stage with their initials on it.

G and L.

Not G and N.

I stood at the doors in my backup gown with my phone in one hand and a white card in the other.

I had gone back to the bridal suite for it, and the empty dress bag was still on the rack.

Bride: L. Vandermeer. Ordered eleven months ago.

Rhett came up beside me and read it over my shoulder.

"That's your dress?"

"That's her dress," I said. "I was just the one who got to practice."

He didn't answer, and when I glanced at him his jaw was tight.

On the stage Clifton stood with a microphone in his hand and Lydia at his side.

"I want to thank everyone for coming on short notice," he said, and his voice cracked on cue.

Three hundred people smiled at him.

"This is the happiest day of my life, and it's because of this woman."

Lydia pressed a hand to her chest.

I started down the center aisle.

A man at a front table saw me first.

Then the woman next to him.

The quartet stumbled and stopped, one instrument at a time.

I kept walking.

The only sound in the room was my heels on the floor and someone's chair scraping back.

Clifton saw me.

His face went blank, and the smile stayed on it a second too long.

"Autumn," he said into the microphone, and the speakers carried it. "You're upset. Let's take this outside."

"I'm not upset," I said. "I'd like to say something."

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