He Put Our Love on Pause, Then Married Her Behind My Back novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Lilies
Jenna delivers a congratulations arrangement to a toast for her own boyfriend's wedding, ends it in front of the room, and learns he drained her savings that morning.
I carried two dozen white lilies into the Redfield Freight break room at 3:15 on a Thursday, and the whole office was singing to my boyfriend.
The order had come through our website that morning.
Roz had printed the card and left it on the cooler door, under the pink Vegas chapel magnet we use to hold delivery slips.
Travis wrote on the back of that magnet years ago: Vegas doesn't count.
I always thought it was funny.
The card said: Congratulations Travis and Brooke, with love from the whole team.
I read it twice in the shop.
Roz read it over my shoulder and said a word I won't write down.
"Send the driver," she said.
"I'm taking the van," I said.
Travis had been on a break from me for ten days.
That is what he calls it when we fight. He says "We're on a break," and from that second he is single and I am the girl he comes back to.
The first time, he took his coworker Brooke Pennell to the movie I'd been dying to see.
The second time, he canceled my birthday reservation and took her to a new sushi place.
This time I had asked to move up our savings plan for the shop's cold room.
On Monday Brooke had texted me, out of nowhere: "Don't let him upset you. He talks about you all the time. xx"
I had thought it was kind.
I stood in the doorway of the break room with the lilies in both arms.
There was a sheet cake on the table with two names piped in blue.
Brooke stood beside it in a white blazer, and her left hand was up, showing the room a ring.
Travis had his arm around her waist.
Thirty people were clapping.
One man was not.
He stood at the back by the coffee machine in a charcoal jacket, a paper cup in his hand, looking at me and not at the cake.
Travis saw me, and his smile stopped.
"Jen!" he said, and for a second he looked glad to see me. "Hey. You brought flowers. That's so like you."
Then he remembered the cake.
"We're on a break," he added, almost kindly.
The clapping stopped, one pair of hands at a time.
I walked to the table and set the lilies down next to the cake.
"These are from Corliss Blooms," I said. "Forty-two dollars, delivery included. Someone in this office put it on the company card."
Brooke came around the cake with her hand already out.
"Oh, honey," she said. "I wanted to tell you myself. I really did."
"When did you get married?"
"Friday," Travis said. "At the courthouse. It was small."
"Friday was day four of the break."
"It's a pause, Jen." He said it softly. "It's paperwork. Brooke's dad had a thing about it. You know how this works. It's always the same."
He was right.
I knew exactly how it worked.
I looked at Brooke.
"You were the movie," I said. "You were the sushi place on my birthday."
"I didn't know it was your birthday dinner," Brooke said, and her eyes filled up. "Travis never said. I would never have gone."
Somebody in the back said "Oh my God" in a low voice.
Somebody else had her phone up.
Travis stepped between us.
"Don't make this a scene," he said. "You're upset. Go home, we'll talk tonight. I'll come by."
"You'll come by."
"I always do."
He did. That was the worst part.
Every break had ended with Travis on my doorstep, and me opening the door.
I picked the card out of the lilies.
I read it out loud in my flat shop voice.
"Congratulations Travis and Brooke, with love from the whole team."
Then I tore it in half and put both halves on the cake, right on the blue piping.
"The break is over," I said. "So is everything else."
Brooke's face crumpled.
"Jenna, please, don't be like this."
"I'm not being like anything. I'm leaving."
So I stepped out.
I walked through the office, past thirty people who all found something to look at on their desks.
The man from the back of the room was holding the glass door open for me.
He did not say a word.
He did not look sorry or pleased.
He just held it until I was through.
I made it to the van before my hands began to shake.
I put both of them on the wheel and breathed until I could see the parking lot properly.
Then my phone buzzed with a bank alert.
I almost didn't open it.
Withdrawal, joint savings account ending 4471. Today, 8:52 a.m.
$8,400.00.
That was the cold room.
That was two years of putting aside fifty dollars a week.
That was every dollar Travis and I had agreed was for my shop, and he had taken it out of the bank the morning of his wedding toast.
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