My Fiancé and Brothers Left Me at the Altar for My Adopted Sister novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Forty Minutes
June waits at the altar while her fiancé and brothers have run to protect her adopted sister, finds them pinning a stranger to the asphalt, hands her ring to Victoria in front of her guests, and hears the stranger say Victoria invited him.
I had been standing alone at the altar for forty minutes.
A hundred and forty people sat behind me in the stone chapel, and none of them were talking.
The string quartet had played the same piece three times.
The groom's side was empty in the front row, where Kent's mother should have been sitting.
I wasn't sure where she was either.
My bouquet had started to wilt in my hands.
At ten forty, my adopted sister Victoria had posted a photo in the family group chat.
It showed a scrape on the door of her white sedan.
"Someone hit my car in the parking lot," she wrote. "I'm shaking. I'm scared to be out here alone."
Kent answered almost immediately.
"Stay in your car. Coming."
Then my brother Dustin wrote, "On my way."
Then my other brother, Ross, wrote, "Two minutes."
Not one of them had written a word to me.
I knew because my phone was in my left hand, and I had read the thread half a dozen times.
Victoria was twenty-four.
Dad had brought her home when she was twelve, after her mother died, and I had braided her hair for the first week.
She had cried at every holiday since, and each time my brothers had put an arm around her first.
I used to think that was kind of them.
Our officiant cleared his throat.
"Miss Doherty, we could take a short break."
"No," I said. "I'm going to go find them."
I lifted my skirt and walked down the aisle.
My maid of honor half stood up, and I shook my head.
The side door of the chapel opened onto the parking lot, and the noon light was so bright it hurt.
Forty feet away, three men in wedding clothes were bent over something on the asphalt.
Kent was kneeling in his charcoal tuxedo with one knee in the dirt.
Dustin had a fistful of someone's jacket.
Ross was holding down a pair of legs.
Under them, a man in a black suit lay on his stomach with his cheek against the ground.
He was not fighting back.
His hands were flat on the pavement where everyone could see them.
"Don't move," Kent was saying. "Don't you move."
Victoria stood a few steps off with Kent's jacket around her shoulders.
Her face was wet, and her lower lip shook, and she held her phone up in front of her.
She was filming.
At the chapel door behind me, a dozen of my guests had started to gather, and half of them had their phones out too.
"June!" Victoria called. She sounded relieved. "June, be careful, it's him!"
"Who?" I said.
"The man who's been following me." She pressed a hand to her chest. "He was waiting by my car."
I looked at the man on the ground.
He turned his head as far as Dustin's grip would let him.
He was around thirty-five, with a dark stubbled jaw and brown eyes that didn't look scared.
They looked tired.
They looked at me the way you look at a person you have been hoping to meet for years, and are sorry to meet like this.
"Where's the wedding?" I asked.
Nobody answered.
"Kent."
He glanced up at me, and then at my dress, and he had the decency to look uncomfortable for one second.
"June, go back inside. We'll finish this in a minute. Victoria was really scared."
"You left me at the altar."
"We were never leaving you." He said it gently, as if I were the one being slow. "Victoria needed us. Be an adult about it, please."
Dustin didn't even look up.
"Don't make this about you," he said. "Not today."
It was the day I had picked.
It was my father's chapel, because Dad had married Mom in it.
I looked at Victoria's phone, and at the guests with their phones, and at the three men I had trusted for most of my life.
Not one of them had come to find me.
I reached up and slid the ring off my finger.
It was a two-carat diamond that Kent had chosen himself, and it came off easily.
I walked across the lot in my dress and stopped in front of Victoria.
"Here," I said, and I put it in her palm and folded her fingers over it. "He's yours now. You've both earned it."
The whole lot went quiet.
Kent stood up so fast his knee left a smear of dirt on his tuxedo.
"June, don't."
"Take care of the guests," I said. "I'm going to go and sit down."
I turned around.
Behind me, the man on the asphalt said, quietly and very clearly, "Ask her to show you her phone."
Dustin pushed his face into the pavement.
"Shut up."
"She texted me this morning at seven," the man said. "She told me to be in this parking lot at eleven."
Victoria's smile slipped.
Not much.
I was the only one close enough to see it go.
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