Chapter 13
Thirteen
The gown is in the corner.
I dropped it there earlier, before my shower. The hem is dark with the grime of a gas station floor, church steps, and a small-town pavement. Thousands of dollars of someone else’s vision, sitting in the corner of a budget hotel room in Opal Creek.
It’s not too unlike how I feel.
I’m sitting on the closed toilet lid with a towel around me and another around my hair. My face is completely bare for the first time in twenty-four hours. No makeup. No veil. No constructed version of myself assembled for anyone else’s approval.
Just me.
I’m not sure I recognize her.
Three knocks on the door pull me out of my reverie.
I open the bathroom door a crack to see Griffin standing there, holding his phone out to me.
“It’s Madison,” he says.
My stomach drops and tightens in the same motion. The guilt that’s been sitting in my chest since the church steps sharpens.
Griffin offers me a smile that makes me steel my spine. I try to smile back. I think my mouth moves.
“Thanks,” I whisper as I take the phone.
Madison doesn’t cry. That’s how I know she was scared. When she’s frightened, she goes very quiet and very still. Her voice comes out careful and even, and she asks questions in the order she’s numbered them in her head.
“Are you safe?” she asks.
“Yes.”
“Are you okay?”
“Working on it.”
“And you’re with Griffin?”
“Yes.”
“Okay.” A long exhale. “Okay.”
Then she’s just there, on the other end of the line, not filling the silence, just being in it with me the way she has done my entire life. My sister, who learned to be steady because someone had to be, decided early that it would be her.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “About today. About everything. I’m sorry I didn’t—”
“Stop.” Her voice is firm but not unkind. “You don’t apologize to me. Not for this.”
“Mom—”
“Is fine. She’s worried, but she’s fine. Rowan is… Well, Rowan is Rowan.”
“She called it,” I say. “With the shitting myself thing.”
“She called it at the rehearsal dinner, actually. She had twenty dollars on it.”
“She bet money on my wedding?”
“On you not going through with it,” she corrects. “Which she maintains is different.”
I laugh before I press my lips together and look at the floor.
“Piper,” she implores. “You can tell me. Whatever it is. All of it. Whenever you’re ready.”
And I want to. I want to sit on this bathroom floor and tell my sister everything, all of it, pour out the last three years in the order it happened and let her help me make sense of it.
But there’s something in me that isn’t ready yet, some door that needs to stay shut for just a little longer, until I understand the shape of what’s behind it.
“Not yet. I will. Just not yet.”
We stay on the line for another few minutes. She tells me Noah and Rowan said to tell me they love me. She tells me not to worry about the fallout because the fallout will wait; it has no choice.
When we hang up, I sit with the phone in my hands for a long moment.
Then I look up.
Griffin is leaning against the doorframe, arms crossed, watching me with those gray eyes. His shirt is untucked now. He looks like a man who has been running at full capacity all day and is still somehow upright, which I find both admirable and slightly irritating.
I know what I need to do.
I’ve been circling it since the shower.
“Can I use your phone again?”
He watches me.
“To call Ezra,” I say.
Something moves across his face. “You’re sure?”
“I need to get it over with.” I stand, tightening the towel. “The longer I leave it, the worse it’ll—” I stop. “I just need to do it.”
He looks at me for one more second, then straightens. “I’ll go for a walk. Give you some space.”
“Thanks, Griffin… For everything.”
He dips his chin, and then he’s gone.
I sit on the edge of the tub, inhale a steadying breath, and dial.
Ezra picks up on the second ring.
There’s a silence before either of us speaks.
“Hey,” I breathe out, feeling my heart pound in my chest.
Nothing.
“Ezra?”
“So you’re alive.” His voice is quiet. The words are not.
“I’m safe. I’m sorry I didn’t—”
“Where are you?”
“I’m—” I pause. “I’m safe,” I repeat because I’m afraid that if I tell him where I am, he’ll find me. Right now, I just need space.
Another silence. I know this silence. I’ve learned the architecture of his silences the way you learn the layout of a house you’ve lived in long enough, where the creaky floorboard is, what to step around in the dark.
“Fine.” The word lands like a closed door.
“Ezra, I need to—”
“I had three hundred guests at that church today, Piper.”
“I know.”
“My mother. My father’s colleagues. People I cannot afford to—” When he continues, his voice is quieter. More careful. “Do you have any idea what today looked like?”
“I know.”
“Do you? Because from where I was standing, my fiancée walked out in front of everyone.” Still quiet. Still even. The restraint is somehow worse than if he’d shouted. “I need you to help me understand what happened.”
I curl my fingers around the phone. “I couldn’t go through with it.”
“You couldn’t?”
“I needed—I didn’t feel—” The words I have are wrong. Every version of the sentence I build in my head dissolves before I can say it.
I felt like I was disappearing.
I haven’t recognized myself in years.
I wore the dress you told me to wear, stood in the flowers you chose, looked at the sign your mother made, and couldn’t find a single thing that was mine.
“I panicked,” I say instead.
“You panicked? That’s what you’re going with? After everything I’ve done.” His voice drops lower, and something in my chest responds to the drop the way it always has. “After all the planning. Do you know what my mother is dealing with right now? Do you care?”
I press my hand flat against my knee. “Of course I care.”
“It doesn’t feel like it.”
“I know how it looks.”
“Who are you with?”
My hand tightens. “A friend.”
“Which friend?”
Oh fuck.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
He’s going to explode.
“Griffin,” I finally answer in a whisper. “Noah’s friend.”
“I know who he is.” The evenness cracks, just for a second, then seals back up. “You’re with him?”
“That’s not—it’s not like that.”
“I didn’t say it was.” There it is, the technique I’ve never been able to argue with because he never said the thing. I just heard it. “I find it interesting that on the morning of our wedding, you managed to find yourself in a car with someone else.”
My face is hot. “I was running. He happened to be there.”
“Hmm.”
“There’s nothing—”
“Piper, I’m not accusing you of anything.” I’m just making sure you know that I noticed. “I’m trying to have a conversation with you about what happened today.”
I sit with my mouth closed.
“Are you coming home?” he asks.
“I need some time.”
“Time?”
I look at my engagement ring sitting next to the sink, and I realize that I have no desire to put it back on. It felt heavy on my hand.
“I just need a few days.”
“For what? You ran out of our wedding. You need a few days to process that? Or do you need a few days to figure out what story you’re going to tell people?”
My chest hollows. “That’s not what I—”
“Because there are things I could say right now,” he says, quiet as anything. “About the way you’ve been lately. About the conversations we’ve had. The things I’ve been patient about.”
The things he’s been patient about?
The solo. The career I put on pause. The family dinners I missed. The version of myself I kept editing because the current draft wasn’t quite right. All of it, arranged in a ledger I never consented to, being held somewhere just out of view for exactly this kind of moment.
I hear him exhale. When he speaks again, the warmth is back. “I love you. You know that. But you need to come home, and we need to talk about this properly. Face to face.”
Something in me wants to fold. Old habit, old pattern, the deep groove of three years of learning that it’s easier to move toward him than to hold ground, because holding ground costs something, and I’ve never been entirely sure what.
“Come home, Piper.”
Jesus, just say no. It’s one word. A small word.
“Not right now,” I say instead.
“Why are you doing this? What are you trying to prove?”
“I’m not trying to prove anything.”
“This is not who you are. Running away like this. Embarrassing both of us.” I open my mouth and close it again when he continues. “And whatever you’ve told that family of yours—”
“I haven’t told them anything.”
“Right. Fine. Just come home. We’ll sort it out. We can reschedule if you want. If you need more time before the ceremony, we can—”
“Ezra.”
“What?”
The words sit in my throat for me to turn it over. “I don’t think I’m coming home.”
The silence this time is different.
“Excuse me?”
“I… I can’t do this. Me. Us. We haven’t worked for a long time.”
He ignores all of it. “Okay, Piper. Do what you need to do. I’ll be here when you’re ready.”
I know what that means.
I’ll be here means this conversation isn’t over. It means I’m building a file. It means every day I’m gone is a day that gets added to the ledger, the same ledger that already has the solo in it and the missed dinners and the conversations he’s been patient about.
It means when you come back, you will owe me.
“Goodbye, Ezra.” The words get caught in a silent sob.
He hangs up without replying.
I hold the phone in both hands and look at the bathroom floor.
The tile is white. Small square tiles, the kind in hotels that have been in business since the seventies, slightly uneven in places. I count them without meaning to. One, two, three—
Something breaks open in my chest.
The sobbing comes before I’m ready for it.
It’s ugly and lacks any of the dignity I’ve been holding on to all day.
It’s not just one thing—that’s the worst part.
It’s everything all at once. All my emotions feel contradictory and impossible to sort out: the grief of losing something I chose, the relief of losing it, the grief over the relief, the guilt of both.
The three years of small, suppressed feelings suddenly hit me all at once now that something has shifted, and I don’t know how to bear the weight.
He loves me.
I think he loves me.
I think he loves me in the only way he knows how, and I think his way has been hollowing me out for years. I can’t tell anymore where the love ends and the damage begins.
You couldn’t even do a wedding right.
I press the heels of my hands into my eyes and push, but nothing happens. The tears come anyway. I’m shaking, and I can’t catch my breath.
I don’t hear the door.
I don’t hear the footsteps.
But I feel the hands.
Warm, closing around my wrists, pulling my hands gently but firmly away from my face.
“Piper?” Griffin’s voice sounds raw.
He looks at me for one second and then curses under his breath.
“Fuck.”
He sits down on the bathroom floor.
This man, who has been upright all day while I fell apart in every possible direction, puts his back against the tub and says, “Come here.”
And I do.
I just crawl into the space he’s made. His arms come around me and hold tight. I press my face into his shoulder, and I cry in a way I haven’t cried in years.
I should care that I’m in a towel. I’m aware, somewhere in the back of my functioning brain, that this is something I should be embarrassed about. I think briefly about what conclusion Ezra would come to if he saw this scene.
The thought forms, and I push it out.
I don’t have the energy to care.
I don’t have the energy for anything except this: the solid warmth of Griffin’s shoulder, and his arms around me.
The towel has climbed up my thighs. Before I can, Griffin adjusts it over my legs without a word.
He doesn’t say, It’s okay.
He doesn’t say, You’ll be fine.
He doesn’t say anything.
He just stays.
And that, it turns out, is the only thing I needed anyone to do.