He Sent a Proxy Groom, So I Walked Away Forever novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: A Mask at the Altar
Lena walks toward a stranger in a mask printed with Brooks's face, his phone rings in his mother's purse, and she walks out; in the parking lot the stand-in takes the mask off and he is Cal.
The man waiting for me at the altar wore a paper mask printed with Brooks's face.
Three hundred guests watched me see it.
I stopped halfway down the aisle with my bouquet in both hands.
The mask had Brooks's smile, Brooks's sandy hair and the little crease by his left eye.
Under it was a stranger's neck, a rented tux and a pair of big hands holding a cardboard ring box.
I had walked alone because my mother was three years gone and I had said I wanted it that way.
Now I wished someone were holding my arm.
In the bridal suite, half an hour before, Brooks's mother had cupped my face in both hands.
"Brooks's flight is stuck in Chicago, darling," said Gwendolyn. "Courtland men have always married by proxy when they're delayed. It's an old family custom."
"A proxy is a person," I said. "Where would he find a person?"
"A stand-in, a few words, and you two say the real vows Sunday. Nobody will think twice."
She fixed my veil, and then she unclasped my mother's pearls from my neck.
"Let me put these in my purse for the photographer's detail shot," she said. "Something old. I'll hand them back at the reception."
She had brought me soup every Sunday for a year, and I let her take them.
At 2:10 my phone had lit up with a text from Brooks.
"Mom explained, right? Just walk it, babe. Real vows Sunday. Trust me."
I had read it four times and still not understood why he hadn't called me instead.
Now I looked at the front row.
Hallie, my maid of honor, was half out of her seat, mouthing "No" at me over her bouquet.
Gwendolyn sat beside her in dove gray, smiling, with both hands folded on her purse.
The whole room was holding up phones.
I walked the rest of the way because stopping again would have been worse.
The stand-in moved when I reached the altar.
He stepped to my left side without being told.
I am deaf in my right ear, from a fever when I was six, and I turn my left ear toward everyone I want to hear.
Brooks had stood on my right for five years and never once remembered.
The officiant, a friend of Gwendolyn's, cleared his throat and began.
"Dearly beloved."
My hands shook so hard that the petals on my bouquet trembled.
I took my phone out of the pocket my aunt had sewn into the dress and dialed Brooks.
It rang once.
Then a song I knew started up in the front row.
It was the song Brooks had picked for his ringtone, the one we'd danced to at his birthday.
It was coming from Gwendolyn's purse.
His phone had been in his mother's handbag the whole time.
Gwendolyn looked down at the purse, then up at me.
She didn't reach for it.
She smiled at me, calm and pleasant.
"Go on, darling," she said, loud enough for the first six rows. "It's only a formality."
The officiant read the line about taking this man.
The man in the mask said something into the paper that I couldn't make out.
He held out the ring box, and I could see the folded cardboard edge.
I looked at Hallie.
I looked at my mother's seat in the first row, the empty one with a white rose on it.
I thought about the $48,000 of her life insurance I had put into this day.
I thought about Sunday, and what Brooks would say about Sunday.
So I stepped out.
I held the bouquet out to Hallie across the front pew, and she took it with both hands.
"I'm sorry," I said to the man in the mask. "You shouldn't be here either."
"Go," he said, low and quiet, in a voice that came out muffled through the paper.
I turned and walked back down the aisle alone.
Nobody stopped me.
Somebody near the back started filming at my feet and then at my face.
The only guest who got up and followed was the photographer.
Gwendolyn lifted two fingers at him from her seat, and he came after me with his camera up.
I pushed the heavy doors open and went down the stone steps in my dress, into the parking lot and the afternoon sun.
I stood next to a car that wasn't mine, because mine was blocked in by the caterers and my keys were in the suite.
My heart was going so hard I couldn't hear the lake.
The doors opened behind me.
"Lena," said a man's voice.
I didn't turn around.
"Don't follow me."
"I'm not Brooks," he said, "and I'm not going to ask you to go back in."
I knew that voice.
I had not heard it in seven years.
I turned around anyway.
He pulled the paper mask off and let it drop on the asphalt.
It was Cal Reiner, with the scar through his left eyebrow and sawdust still in the creases of his hands.
He was the man who had left me without a word, and he was standing on my left.
Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend