The Wedding He Stole Was My Great Escape novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Read It Into the Microphone

Mireille reads her brother's schedule aloud at the reception on a livestream, the groom calls the wedding a show, and she is thrown out onto the loading dock where the man they call a stalker says Lorna is still his wife.

I walked into the Ackerly Grand ballroom at ten past six with blood dried to my elbow.

My dress was gray with road dust and torn at the hem.

Three hundred guests turned around at the same time.

The band stopped in the middle of a song.

At the head table, Preston stood up so fast his chair fell over.

Lorna sat beside him in cream silk with my veil pins still in her hair.

Over the dance floor, a camera on a long arm swung toward me, and its red light came on.

The livestream was still running.

"Mireille," my mother said, hurrying across the floor with her hands out. "Oh, thank God. We were so worried."

"You were not," I said.

She stopped.

I went straight past her to the DJ booth and held out my hand.

The DJ looked at the guests, then at me, and gave me the microphone.

"Good evening," I said. "I'm Mireille Fairbanks. This was supposed to be my wedding."

Nobody moved.

"I've been locked in a limousine on the bridge since noon," I said. "I was the bride, and I'm the one who got left."

The phone screens lifted all over the room.

"Mireille, sit down," my father said, coming toward me. "You're unwell."

"I'm an ER nurse," I said. "I know exactly how unwell I am."

I unfolded the page from my bag.

"My brother wrote a schedule for today," I said. "He left it on my kitchen counter."

I read it into the microphone, one line at a time.

"Noon, the bridge, all drivers kill engines."

A murmur went through the room.

"Twelve-oh-five, T locks M in the limo."

"T is my brother Tobias," I said. "M is me."

Tobias stood by the bar with a champagne flute halfway to his mouth.

"Four o'clock, ceremony, L in the cream dress."

Every head turned to Lorna.

She put her hand over her mouth and her eyes filled up.

"Five-thirty, M home, T brings champagne," I read.

I held the page up to the camera.

"And at the bottom, in his handwriting: She'll forgive us by Sunday."

The ballroom was so quiet I could hear the cameraman's breathing.

"Cut the feed," a man shouted from the back, and the red light went off.

I kept the microphone.

"Somebody tell me what I'm forgiving," I said. "Tell me, in front of everyone, why a bride was locked in a car so her fiancé could marry someone else."

"Mar." Preston was walking toward me with his palms out, speaking low and slow. "Give me the mic."

"No."

"It wasn't a real wedding," he said. "It was a show. It was never legal."

"You put a ring on her finger," I said. "You promised her happiness."

"For the cameras. For Lorna's safety. The man who stalks her was in the crowd. We needed him to see it."

He turned to the guests with a sad, patient face.

"We told Mireille the plan weeks ago," he said. "She refused to listen. She gets overwhelmed."

I stared at him.

We had not told me anything.

There was no plan, and he knew it, and three hundred people were nodding.

"You are lying," I said.

"She's exhausted," my mother said, to the room. "Look at her arm. She needs a doctor."

"Not here, sweetheart," my father said, and took my elbow.

Two security guards had appeared at my sides.

Lorna rose from the table with tears running down her cheeks.

"Please don't be angry with them, Mireille," she said, in her soft voice. "I didn't want any of this. I only wanted to feel safe."

Half the room sighed at her.

I looked at the people who had known me my whole life.

Not one of them said my name.

"Take your hand off me," I told my father.

He didn't.

The guards walked me through the kitchen, past the stacked trays, and out the back door onto the loading dock.

The door shut behind me, and the lock turned.

I stood on the concrete in my ruined gown with the schedule in my fist.

I had nothing.

No ring, no home, no family I could call.

Something scraped at the far end of the dock.

A man sat on an upturned milk crate against the wall.

He wore a gray coat, and a manila envelope lay across his knee.

I knew him from the livestream.

The guards had walked him out of the same door two hours before me.

"You're the bride," he said. "They said you ran."

"They locked me in a car," I said.

He stood up slowly, and he kept his hands where I could see them.

"I'm Jasper MacAvoy," he said. "Lorna Standish is my wife."

"Your ex-wife," I said. "That's what they said."

"Wife," he said. "Present tense."

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