An Anonymous Confession Game Ruined My Wedding novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Third Card
At the confession game the night before his wedding, Finbar reads a card that says his best man has a daughter with the bride; he walks out and the bride's mother blocks the door.
The night before my wedding, I stood in the lodge lounge with a white card in my hand and fourteen people watching me.
Brooke had planned the game for a month.
She called it a confession game.
Everyone in the wedding party got a plain white card and a black pen, and she handed them out herself, one by one.
"One truth each," she said. "Nobody signs. Nobody gets mad. Tomorrow we start clean."
Her mother sat on the couch with a glass of white wine and nodded along.
My best man wrote his in two seconds and folded it. Dalton had been my best friend since our first week of college.
My sister wrote hers with her tongue between her teeth. She was a bridesmaid because Brooke had asked her, and she had said yes because I asked her to.
Brooke was the last one to drop her card into the box.
The box was her veil box, white and square with a satin ribbon, and she held it against her stomach while she shuffled the cards with one hand.
"Finbar reads," she said. "The groom always reads."
She put the box in my lap and kissed my cheek.
I pulled the first card.
"I once ate an entire wedding cake layer in a parking lot," I read.
Everybody laughed, and my sister, Hattie, raised her hand and took a bow.
The second card said somebody in the room still owed the florist three hundred dollars.
Brooke's mother looked at her wine.
The third card was folded in half, and the ink was pressed deep into the paper.
I read it out loud before I understood it.
"The best man has a daughter," I said. "Her mother is the bride."
Nobody laughed.
I read the card again, silently this time, and the words stayed the same.
Dalton was standing by the window, and he had stopped moving.
"That's not funny," Hattie said. "Who wrote that?"
Nobody answered her.
I looked at Dalton, and then at Brooke.
Brooke had put both hands over her mouth.
Poppy was two years old. Dalton had told me her mother was an ex from Denver who left when she was a baby.
I had babysat Poppy. I had taught her to say Fin-Fin. I had bought her the gray stuffed whale she carried everywhere.
"Brooke," I said.
"Finbar, it's a joke," Brooke said.
"Dalton?"
Dalton didn't say a word.
That was the answer.
Brooke took her hands off her mouth, and her eyes were wet and steady.
"It started before you proposed," she said. "I was going to tell you. I swear I was going to tell you."
"How long?" I asked.
"Six years."
I had been with her for six years.
"Please don't hurt Dalton," she said. "This is on me. He's been your friend for thirteen years. Please."
I looked at her. She was asking me to protect the man who had been in my groomsmen photos for a month.
Hattie was on her feet. "You're kidding me. You're worried about him?"
"Hattie," I said.
"She's worried about him, Finbar."
"I know."
I stood up and put the card in the veil box on top of the others.
I took the engagement band off my left hand, the one Brooke had slid on four years ago, and I laid it on the satin ribbon.
"I'm not hurting anyone," I said. "I'm leaving."
"You can't leave," Brooke said. "Everyone is coming tomorrow."
"I know who's coming."
I walked past the couch. Her mother put her wine down and did not stand up.
Dalton said my name once, quietly.
I kept walking.
The lounge door opened onto the long hallway of the lodge, with its pine beams and framed photographs of the lake in winter.
I had my hand on the stair rail when Brooke's mother said my name behind me.
She had followed me out.
She stood in the doorway with her arms folded, between me and the stairs.
"Eighty-two people are driving here tomorrow," she said. "Walk out tonight and you will pay for every one of them."
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