The Wedding He Stole Was My Great Escape novel · Chapter 12 of 24

Chapter 12: Then It's a Very Short Marriage

He did it before I woke up.

Greta shook me at seven with her phone in her hand and a very worried face.

"Don't be mad," she said. "Look."

It was a video posted from Jasper's account at 5:12 that morning.

He sat at the workbench in the gray coat with the lamp behind him and looked straight into the camera.

"My name is Jasper MacAvoy," he said. "I'm Lorna Standish's husband. We were never divorced."

He held three sets of papers up to the lens, and every blank signature line showed.

"On September twentieth I stood in the back of a rooftop wedding and let my wife marry another man," he said. "I did it on purpose, because I needed it filmed."

He swallowed once.

"I heard a guest ask where the bride was. I did nothing. A woman named Mireille Fairbanks was locked in a car on a bridge while I stood there and waited for the rings."

I stopped breathing.

"I should have asked," he said. "I'm telling you now, so nobody can say I hid it. She is not part of what I did. I'm sorry."

He reached forward and ended the recording.

Under the post, the comments had begun, two hundred a minute.

Some were furious at him.

Most were not.

"He gave himself up," Greta said. "He just handed Lorna's lawyers the whole case against him."

"I know."

"I think I might like him."

"I know," I said again.

He had also attached a second file.

It was the footage from his own phone, shot from the back row on the roof.

I watched it with my knees pulled up and my hand over my mouth.

The officiant asking if anyone objected.

Lorna's bright, steady eyes.

The ring on her finger.

And then the officiant's voice, asking both of them whether either was still bound to another person.

Lorna said, "I am free to marry," and she did not blink.

She had said that in front of four hundred thousand strangers, with her husband standing forty feet away.

I closed the phone.

Then I put my shoes on.

"Where are you going?" Greta asked.

"To tell him it doesn't fix anything."

"Is that really what you're going to tell him?"

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