Wedding Eve Goodbye novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Sweet Dreams, Little Wolf
The night before the wedding Elin hears her fiance whisper a lullaby for his assistant, leaves her ring on his desk and tells the guests there will be no wedding; his only answer is get lost.
"Get lost."
That was the first thing Dominic Haldane ever said to me, and three years later it was still most of what he said.
He said it when I brought coffee to his office.
He said it when I reached for his hand at our engagement party, in front of two hundred people.
I told myself he was just a hard, quiet man who hated being touched.
His driver took me home from every dinner, and Dominic followed in a second car.
In three years I had never once ridden anywhere with him.
I loved him anyway, and I had decided that was my problem to carry.
The night before our wedding, the stone house on the river was full of people.
His grandmother sat by the fire with her cane across her knees.
His cousins were drinking in the hall, and my stepmother had a room upstairs.
My stepmother caught me at the foot of the stairs while I was looking for my phone charger.
"He's been shut in his study since the toast," she said. "Go say goodnight, sweetheart. A bride shouldn't sleep on silence."
She straightened my cardigan collar with both hands.
She was typing on her phone as she said it, and she smiled at me over the screen.
"Go on. You deserve a kind word tonight."
I went down the long hallway to the study.
The door was open a hand's width, and lamplight lay across the floor.
I heard Dominic's voice, and it stopped me with my fingers on the wood.
He was humming.
It was a slow, plain tune, and I had never heard him hum anything.
Then he spoke very softly, in the voice I had wished for since the day we met.
"Close your eyes. Nobody is coming tonight. You can put it all down until morning."
There was a pause, and I heard him breathe out.
"Sweet dreams, my little wolf."
I stood there with my hand flat on the door.
My ring felt tight on my finger.
I pushed the door open.
Dominic was at his desk with his phone in his hand and his thumb on the screen.
He had a small black recorder in front of him, and its red light was still on.
"Who is that for?" I asked.
He turned the phone face down on the blotter.
"Get lost, Elin."
His phone buzzed against the wood, and I read the lock screen upside down before he covered it.
Mina Lowell: Thank you. I'll play it when I go to bed.
Mina was his assistant, twenty-one years old, and she had worked for him for three years.
I had met her a dozen times, and she had never once looked me in the eye.
"You have a voice like that," I said. "I've been waiting three years for it."
He said nothing.
"You hum for her. You tuck her in over a phone the night before you marry me."
"That recording has nothing to do with you."
"Of course it doesn't."
His face did not change, and that hurt worse than anything he could have said.
I pulled the ring off my finger.
It stuck at the knuckle, and I pulled harder and set it on his blotter.
"Then I won't be a bother to you anymore," I said.
"Elin."
"You can say it one more time, if you like."
He looked at the ring and not at me.
"Get lost," he said.
So I left.
I walked back down the hallway to the great hall, where his cousins stood with their glasses and Odile looked up from the fire.
Rhonda was at the foot of the stairs with her hand already on her chest.
I stopped on the third step so they could all see me.
"There is no wedding tomorrow," I said. "Please tell the caterers and the church."
Nobody said a word.
Odile's cane, his grandmother's, tapped once on the floor.
Then Mina came down the stairs in grey pajamas and a cardigan, her braid over one shoulder and her phone in her hand.
She was holding it out in front of her with both hands.
His voice was coming out of it, low and warm, humming the same tune.
Every person in the hall heard it.
Mina saw my bare hand, and she went the color of paper.
"Miss Marden," she whispered. "I can explain."
"Mina."
Dominic stood in the study doorway.
He did not look at me when he said it.
"Go upstairs. Now."
She went without another word, and the humming stopped halfway up the stairs when she switched it off.
I waited for him to say her name again, or mine, or anything.
"Is that all?" I asked.
His jaw moved, and he stayed where he was.
"Get lost," he said.
Rhonda put my coat around my shoulders and squeezed my arms.
I walked out through the front door into the rain.
His driver was waiting by the car with the door already open, and I walked past him down the gravel drive.
My phone buzzed before I reached the gate.
It was Rhonda.
Come home, sweetheart. I already put the kettle on.
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