The One Who Waited novel · Chapter 10 of 24

Chapter 10: Thirty-First

I sat down on a paint bucket and scrolled.

Forty thousand likes in twenty minutes.

The comments came faster than I could read them.

ew. no wonder he left.

Luke read them over my shoulder.

He went very quiet and very still, and then he walked out of the paint shop.

I found him in the loading bay, sitting in the truck's driver's seat with the engine off and both hands locked on the wheel.

"Where are you going?" I asked.

"I'm not going anywhere," he said. "I just needed somewhere to sit where I wouldn't put my fist through a set."

I climbed into the passenger side and shut the door.

I took out my phone and called Tamara.

"Tell me Derek's in hiding," she said. "Tell me he's fled the country."

"Tamara. The bridal shop. The dress I tried on. Is it still there?"

There was a long pause.

Then Tamara started to laugh, wet and fierce.

"I bought it on the second," she said. "It's in my closet. I was waiting for you to ask."

On Saturday, October thirty-first, I got married in a backless dress.

The crew pulled the black curtain down at four o'clock.

Behind it was the arch.

They'd built it out of fifteen years of other people's shows. A gilded column with a plaster angel on top, right side up now. A piece of a painted moon. A stained-glass window from a church that only existed on stage. Garlands of paper roses somebody had been folding at lunch for two weeks.

Across the top, in the same gold leaf as my shelf, it said DEAL.

I put my hand over my mouth.

The old man from the table saw handed me a clean handkerchief.

"Don't cry on the dress," he said. "It's rented."

"It's not rented."

"Then cry all you want."

Fifty folding chairs. The crew in jackets and ties. My mother in the front row in her church coat. Luke's mother next to her, already crying into a diner napkin.

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