"Call her Aunt." That was how my ex-fiancé found out I married his uncle. novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: You Do the Honors
At her bridal shower, Dessa holds the clicker as her maid of honor's message appears on the wall screen in front of ninety guests; she drops her ring in a champagne glass, walks out, and at a hotel bar a stranger tells her he is Preston's uncle.
My fiancé's mother put the slideshow clicker in my hand in front of ninety guests and said, "You do the honors, dear."
It was Thursday, two days before my wedding, in the great room of his family's lake house.
The wall screen was twelve feet wide, and Preston's phone was already connected to it.
Preston ran everything from his phone.
"The photos are in the album called Dessa and Me," she said. "Press the arrow and enjoy yourself."
She patted my cheek.
She smelled like gardenias, and she had brought me soup every day when I had the flu in March.
Across the room, Preston was cutting the sheet cake with his groomsmen.
He saw the phone in my hand and pointed his knife at it.
"Don't snoop, babe," he called. "It's all groomsmen jokes."
Everybody laughed, and I laughed with them.
My maid of honor lifted a champagne glass from the bar and winked at me.
We had met in nursing school.
She was wearing the green dress I had helped her pick out.
I stood under the screen and pressed the arrow.
The first photo was the two of us at the lake, sunburned, three summers ago.
The second was the night he proposed, my hand over my mouth.
Guests said aww.
On the third photo, a gray banner dropped across the top of the screen, right over my own face.
Kendra: Can't stop thinking about last night. Tell her after the shower or I will. Love you.
It stayed up just long enough for ninety people to read it.
Nobody laughed.
I looked at Kendra.
She was reading her own phone, smiling, with her thumb on the screen.
Then she looked up at the wall, and her face emptied.
"Dess," Preston said. He had put the knife down. "That's not what it looks like."
My thumb tapped the banner by itself.
The thread opened on the wall for the whole room to read.
Last December, a photo of a hotel bed.
In July, a message from Preston: She's at her mom's for the weekend, come over.
In September, from Kendra: Dess is trying on the dress. Meet me at my place after?
Preston: Already in the car.
That was a Tuesday.
I had stood on a box in a bridal shop that Tuesday, holding my breath while the seamstress pinned the hem, and Kendra had held my bag.
Somebody near the bar said, "Oh my God."
A woman put her hand over her mouth.
Preston's father, Lowell, stared at his shoes.
"Dessa, sweetheart," his wife Gwendolyn said, and she took my elbow gently. "Come into the kitchen. These things always look worse than they are."
She said it kindly.
She did not look at the screen.
I noticed that, and then I stopped noticing, because Kendra was walking toward me with both hands out.
"Dess, please, let me explain."
"You wore the green dress," I said.
She stopped.
I pulled my engagement ring off. It was tight, and it took two tries.
I held it over her champagne glass and let go.
The ring dropped in with a small plink and sank to the bottom.
"I'll leave the dress with the florist," I said.
"Babe," Preston said. "Dessa, don't be dramatic. It's Saturday. We have a hundred and forty people coming."
"I paid the deposit on the lodge," I said. "Thirty-eight thousand dollars. You'll hear from me about it."
I set the clicker on the sheet cake.
So I stepped out.
Nobody stopped me except Gwendolyn, who followed me to the front door saying it was a misunderstanding and that I should come home with them and sleep on it.
I drove a mile and pulled into the first hotel I saw.
It was the Bexley Lakeside.
I was too angry to turn around.
The bar was nearly empty.
I sat on the last stool and ordered a bourbon, and the bartender put it down without asking my name.
The man two stools over was watching the lake through the window.
He wore a gray work shirt with the sleeves rolled up.
Black ink ran down his right forearm: a compass, a heron, a coil of rope.
The bartender set a glass in front of him too, without being asked, and never opened a tab.
A woman in a blazer walked behind the bar, saw him, said, "Mr. Bexley," and kept going.
I thought it was the kind of thing a hotel says to family.
My phone buzzed on the bar. It was Preston.
Mom says Saturday stays on. Come home and we'll fix it. Don't be dramatic.
I read it twice.
I turned the phone over.
"Bad day?" the man said.
"My fiancé's mother thinks I'm still getting married on Saturday."
"Are you?"
"I'd marry the next man who walked through that door," I said, "just to see his face."
He turned on the stool and looked at me for the first time.
His eyes were dark, and there was a scar through his left eyebrow.
"Ford Bexley," he said. "Preston's my nephew."
He did not smile.
"You must be the bride."
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