Chapter 21: The Households

June's POV

I put on the wedding dress again, because it was the only formal thing I owned and I wanted him to see it.

Marcy zipped me up in the dressing room off the chapel.

She had flown in two days before with the clean footage on a phone, and a phone call she wouldn't explain.

"The sheriff's deputies are at the bottom of the drive," she said. "Two cars. They think they're here for a welfare check."

"Who told them that?"

"I did." She smoothed the back of my dress. "I said a woman had been threatened at a wedding. I wasn't lying."

I turned around and held her by the shoulders.

"I love you," I said.

"Don't cry. You'll ruin your face."

"I'll cry later."

She laughed, and her chin wobbled.

At two o'clock the chapel was full.

A hundred and ten people, in dark coats, families with their wives and their sons, two sides of the aisle.

I sat in the front pew beside Marcy and Marcello's mother, with the thin gold ring in my pocket and my back straight.

Marcello stood at the end of the row, in a black suit, hands folded.

He did not look at the doors this time.

He looked at me.

The side door opened, and Gwen's father walked in.

He wore the same gray suit as Christmas Eve, and he carried no weapon at all.

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