I Was Always Second. Until I Left. novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Wine on the Dress
Her brother ruins her gown, her groom gives her two choices, and she picks neither and ends it in front of two hundred guests. Outside a stranger holds fifteen letters.
My brother poured a full glass of red wine down the front of my wedding dress.
He did it slowly, looking right at me, with forty minutes left before I was supposed to walk down the aisle.
The wine ran down the ivory silk and soaked the hem, and it kept spreading while I stood there holding my mother's veil.
"Oops," Chandler said.
I looked at the two bridesmaids in the corner of the suite.
Neither of them moved.
One of them lifted her phone, and then lowered it again.
"You knew Lydia wanted Damian," Chandler said, setting the glass on the dresser. "Did you really have to turn this wedding into such a show?"
I had not turned it into anything.
I had been engaged to Damian Draper for a year, and my sister had said congratulations through her teeth at the party.
Damian came to the doorway in his navy morning suit.
He looked at the dress, and then at Chandler.
He didn't look surprised.
"Gillian," he said, "listen to me."
He used the same voice he used on waiters.
"You have two choices."
I waited.
"You can walk down the aisle in that dress, with two hundred people watching, and everyone can see how you look."
He let me picture it.
"Or you can call Lydia, apologize, and tell her you understand why she's upset. Then I'll postpone the wedding, quietly, and we'll sort it out."
The room was very quiet.
Downstairs, a string quartet was playing something soft and expensive.
"Apologize for what?" I asked.
Damian sighed.
"For making her feel like she lost," he said. "It would mean a lot to her. And to me."
I thought about every birthday where Lydia's cake had been bigger than mine.
I thought about the year they sent her to Paris and told me the money was tied up.
I thought about the way my father said my name, as if it was the second item on a list.
Then I thought about Damian saying "postpone" in a calm, warm voice.
Not cancel.
Postpone, quietly, until after I had apologized and been forgiven for the wine on my own dress.
"Before you decide," Damian added, "you should know the papers are still waiting. Your father said we can sign them tonight, if you calm down."
I had no idea what papers he meant.
That was the first time I noticed that I didn't know, and that he thought I should.
"What papers?" I said.
Chandler and Damian looked at each other for half a second.
"Nothing," Damian said. "Wedding paperwork. Pick one, Gillian."
I chose neither.
I took off my mother's veil and laid it on the chair.
I picked up the hem of the ruined gown in both hands.
"Where are you going?" Chandler said.
I walked past him, and past Damian, and down the long staircase.
The wine dripped on the carpet at every step.
The quartet stopped one bar at a time, as people turned to look.
Two hundred guests sat in white chairs in the front hall and spilled out onto the terrace, and every one of them watched me come down.
My father, Clayton Whitman, stood near the bottom, a champagne flute in his hand.
He opened his mouth, and I walked right by him.
I stopped at the foot of the stairs, under the chandelier.
"Thank you all for coming," I said.
My voice came out steadier than I felt.
"There won't be a wedding today."
Someone gasped.
Someone else lifted a phone.
"My engagement to Damian Draper is over," I said. "My brother ruined this dress on purpose, forty minutes ago, and Damian asked me to apologize for it."
Damian was coming down the stairs behind me, fast now.
"Gillian," he said. "Don't do this here."
"You picked here," I said. "You picked the day."
I turned and walked out through the front door.
Behind me the whole house started to talk at once.
On the porch, Chandler caught up and took my arm, low and hard, where no one could see.
"You have no money, Gillian," he said in my ear. "Dad froze your cards the minute the music started. You'll be back by Monday, and you'll say sorry to everybody."
I pulled my arm free.
My cards were in my bag, upstairs, with my keys.
I had my phone, and a dress that weighed ten pounds with wine.
I stood on the steps of my family's house in the afternoon sun, and I did not go back inside.
"So I'm leaving," I said, mostly to myself.
A black car was parked at the curb, and a man was leaning against the door with a flat wooden box under one arm.
He was tall, in a dark suit that wasn't dressed for a wedding.
He straightened up the moment he saw me.
"Miss Whitman," he said. "My name is Malcolm Ward."
He looked at the dress, and his jaw tightened.
"I have been trying to hand you this for fifteen years."
He opened the box.
It was full of envelopes, each one addressed to me in the same slanted hand.
Every one had been stamped RETURN TO SENDER across the front, in my father's writing.
"Your father told me you read them," Malcolm said.
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