New Husband. Old One Gone novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: The First Look
Rosie's fiancé halts their first look for the lieutenant who just walked in from a deployment, so she hands back the ring and crosses the street in her dress, where a survivor tells her that her brother wasn't driving the night he died.
My fiancé, Major Bryce Lanier of the United States Marine Corps, had no idea there was a second wedding waiting for me across the street.
Neither did I.
At 1:29 I was sitting in the makeup chair in the bridal suite with my veil pinned and my hands in my lap.
The photographer had the door cracked an inch so she could catch Bryce's face when he saw me.
My cousin was counting down from ten.
She got to four.
Then a woman's voice in the hallway said, "Where is he? Where's the major?"
The door clicked shut.
Out in the hall, the groomsmen started cheering.
"Spivey's back!"
"Somebody get the captain a chair!"
I knew the name before I saw the face.
Lauren Spivey had been my little brother's lieutenant.
Two years ago Jesse rolled a seven-ton truck on a sand road at Camp Lejeune at two in the morning.
That's what the report said.
He was twenty.
Bryce was his captain then. Bryce was the one who carried the folded flag into Mama's kitchen.
My cousin eased the door open.
Lauren stood in the hallway in her tan uniform, a seabag at her feet, brown from seven months on a ship.
Bryce had both her hands in his.
Six groomsmen in dress blues stood around them in a ring.
"The door's open!" one of them yelled. "Groom, go see your bride!"
Somebody gave Bryce a shove between the shoulders.
He came in holding my bouquet.
He didn't do the turn we'd practiced twelve times.
His eyes went straight back to the door.
"Come on, Rosie. Let's not hold things up. We've got a church to get to."
I stayed in the chair.
He bent down so the photographer wouldn't hear.
"Don't do this today. Lauren's family to me. She walked off a ship this morning and came straight here without eating."
"Bryce."
"We're still getting married at three. It's a ceremony, Rosie. That's all it is."
Then he was back in the hall before I could open my mouth.
I watched through the gap in the door.
The groomsmen had little gift bags for my bridesmaids. White tissue, gold ribbon, a silver bracelet in each one.
One of them scooped up the whole armful and pushed it at Lauren.
She laughed and said she couldn't possibly.
She kept them.
The photographer and the videographer slipped past me into the hall.
Every lens I'd paid for swung toward Lauren Spivey, eating a croissant off my room service tray.
My cousin said, "Rosie, honey."
I held up one hand.
In the quiet suite, my phone buzzed on the vanity.
Sawyer.
I hadn't talked to him since Tuesday.
He'd stood on our fuel dock with his hat in his hands and said, "Don't marry him, Ro. Please."
He wouldn't tell me why.
So I'd shoved him off the dock into the Cape Fear in his good boots.
I opened the text.
"Remember the wedding I promised to throw you, back on my granddad's dock? It's across the street at the Ropewalk. Come if you need it. I just need to know you're okay."
I read it twice.
"Okay."
I stood up.
The dress weighed about as much as an outboard motor. I'd paid for half of it rebuilding a hull on a forty-foot trawler.
I unpinned the veil, laid it on the chair, and walked out into the hall.
The groomsmen stopped laughing.
Lauren had a bracelet on each wrist.
Bryce looked at my bare head and his jaw went tight.
"Go back inside, sweetheart. You're not ready."
"I'm ready."
I pulled the ring off my finger.
It stuck at the knuckle, and I worked it loose in front of all six of his groomsmen.
I put it in his palm and folded his fingers over it.
"It's just a ceremony," I said. "You won't miss it."
"Rosie." He used the low, slow voice he'd used on Mama the day he brought the flag. "You're upset. We'll talk in the car."
I walked past him to the elevator.
The videographer swung his camera around to follow me.
Good.
I rode down nine floors with a bellman who didn't know where to look.
I pushed out the doors onto Front Street and walked into traffic in four thousand dollars of ivory silk.
A man in a pickup leaned on his horn and yelled, "Get it, girl!"
The Ropewalk ran half a block long, old red brick, with both of its big iron doors standing open.
Inside, it was yellow.
Yellow ribbons on every iron column. Yellow flowers in coffee cans. A string of bare bulbs down the middle of the room.
The brass bell off his granddad's dock hung from a beam.
There was a lemon cake, two tiers, lopsided.
On top of it, on a yellow ribbon, sat a brass hex nut.
My first wedding ring. I was eight.
Sawyer's crew stood up from the folding chairs in clean shirts and combed hair. Nine grown men who build staircases for a living.
Sawyer stood at the far end in a gray suit.
He'd cut his own hair. It showed.
"You walked across Front Street in that," he said.
"A man in a pickup was very supportive."
He laughed, and then he stopped.
"Ro, listen. You don't have to marry anybody today. Nobody in this room expects a thing."
"Then what is all this?"
"I wanted you to have somewhere to go," he said. "When you found out."
"Found out what?"
He looked past me to the cake table.
A thin young man stood up behind it, leaning on a cane, in a tie that wasn't his.
I knew his face. He was the boy in the back of half of Jesse's pictures.
"Ma'am," he said. "I'm Corey Spruill. I was in the back of the truck."
His hand shook on the cane.
"Jesse wasn't driving that night. Lieutenant Spivey was."
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