The Man My Sister Left Behind novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Empty Aisle
The bride is gone and Wynne takes the microphone in front of 300 guests, then recognizes the groom's voice as the stranger from her blackout night.
The organ played the bridal march three times.
By the third time, three hundred people had stopped turning to look at the church doors.
They were looking at me instead.
I stood at the front in my navy dress, holding a bouquet of white dahlias, with no bride to hand them to.
I had come home to Kettle Cove four days ago, after three years away.
I had spent those four days pinning, steaming, and teasing my sister about her nerves.
This morning she had hugged me in the bride's room and said, "Go get your seat, Wynne. I'll be right behind you."
That was fifty minutes ago.
I went back down the side hall, and the bride's room was empty.
Her dress was gone from the hanger.
Her shoes were gone, and so was her phone.
On the dressing table, under my sister's engagement ring, was a folded sheet of school stationery.
I read it standing up.
"I can't. Wynne, look after him. I'm sorry. C."
I read it again.
Then I put the ring in my pocket, because I could not stand to leave it lying there.
When I came back into the church, the groom hadn't moved.
Ansel Rooke stood at the altar rail in a gray morning suit, with his hands at his sides.
He was tall, with dark hair and a chipped front tooth, and he stood rigid, refusing to flinch.
Everyone in Kettle Cove knew the Rookes.
They owned the wharf, the cold storage, the inn on the quay, and half the street the church stood on.
His mother sat in the front pew in cream silk and pearls.
She rose as I came up the aisle, and she was smiling.
"Where is she, Wynne?" Beatrice Rooke asked softly.
"I don't know."
"You were the last person to see her."
"She said she'd be right behind me."
Beatrice held out her hand.
I gave her the note.
She read it, and her face did something quick and complicated.
Then she turned to the pews and read it aloud, every word, in a clear carrying voice.
"I can't. Wynne, look after him. I'm sorry."
A sound went through the church.
"Look after him," Beatrice said.
She turned back to me.
"You've been here four days, and this is what you were looking after."
"Mrs. Rooke, I didn't know."
"You came home for the first time in three years, and my son's bride disappears."
She slapped me.
It was a flat, hard crack, and it turned my head.
Nobody moved.
My cheek burned, and the dahlias shook in my hand.
Somewhere in the back, a woman whispered, "Her sister, the one from Alaska."
I had been slapped before.
I work in an emergency room, and a man had once broken my wrist for telling him to sit down.
I had never been slapped in front of three hundred people who thought I deserved it.
I looked at Ansel.
He was looking at the floor.
He didn't look at his mother, or at me.
I put the dahlias down on the altar step, and I walked to the pulpit.
The minister stood beside it with his hands folded, and he stepped aside without a word.
I took the microphone off its stand.
It squealed once.
"Good morning," I said.
Three hundred faces turned.
"I'm Cora's sister, Wynne, and I know what you're all thinking."
My voice shook, so I made it louder.
"My sister didn't tell me she was leaving. I don't know where she is."
"I do know that Ansel Rooke stood here for an hour in front of all of you and didn't say one unkind word about her."
"So whatever you say about her on your way to the car, you can say it to me first."
No one answered.
"The wedding's off," I said. "Please go home, or go and eat, but don't stand around and watch him."
"Cora owes this man an apology, and she'll make it to his face, not through a rumor."
I put the microphone back on its stand.
The silence was so complete that I heard the dahlias slide off the step.
Then, slowly, a few people stood.
Beatrice was white around the mouth, but she said nothing.
I went down the steps and across the front of the church, and I stopped beside the groom.
I held out my arm.
He looked at it for a moment, as though he had forgotten what arms were for.
Then he took it, and we walked out through the side door together, away from the guests and the organ and the flowers.
The vestry was dim and smelled of candle wax.
He let go of me at the doorway and stood with his back to the light.
I couldn't see his face.
"Thank you," he said.
It was low and a little rough.
It was a voice I had last heard in the pitch dark, three years ago, asking me if I was cold.
I stopped breathing.
I knew that voice.
I had lain beside that voice on a boathouse floor, with a storm on the roof and no idea of its owner's name.
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