My Best Friend Wore My Wedding Dress (My Best Friend's Betrayal #7)

Chapter 1

The thing about royal icing is that it doesn't forgive. You pipe a line crooked and it stays crooked. Hardens that way. Becomes permanent in under a minute.

The image.

Let me go back.

* * *

Six months married. That's what I am. Six months since I walked down a stone path at Windmere Gardens in a custom-fitted Sophia Tolli gown — sweetheart neckline, cathedral train, hand-sewn beading across the bodice that caught every piece of late afternoon light.

I remember how it felt. The weight of it.

Twenty-three pounds of silk and tulle and my mother's tears and my father's arm beneath mine.

I remember Kate zipping me in.

Her fingers on the back of my neck, cool and quick. The zipper teeth closing one by one. Her voice behind me: You look so beautiful, Danny. God. He's going to lose his mind.

Kate, my maid of honor. Kate, who I met at a food photography workshop three years ago. Kate, who helped me choose the dress, who organized my bridal shower, who cried real tears in the front row while I said my vows.

I'm going to throw up.

I don't throw up. I pick up the piping bag and I pipe another lace border — tiny, repeating, precise — around the third tier. My hands know what to do even when the rest of me doesn't.

* * *

Here's what happened at 6 PM.

Liam asked me to grab his charger from his laptop bag.

Normal. Fine. I'm in the living room, he's in the shower, and I unzip the front pocket and pull out the cable and something else comes with it.

A small SD card in a plastic case, the kind photographers use.

I know because I use them too — I shoot every cake I make, natural light, macro lens, the whole thing.

It's how I get clients. Instagram, portfolio, word of mouth.

I shouldn't have put it in my laptop. I know that now. But I wasn't suspicious — I was curious. Liam doesn't take photos. Liam's a structural engineer who does math I can't read and wears the same four shirts in rotation. He doesn't own a real camera. So why does he have an SD card?

I slid it into the reader.

Forty-three photos.

The first twelve: shots of our apartment building, the river trail, nothing interesting. The kind of half-focused shots someone takes when they're testing a camera they just borrowed.

The next eight: Kate. Smiling in different outfits. A coffee shop. A bench in Riverside Park. Candid-looking but posed — her chin tilted, her hair arranged. The way you look when someone's said hold still, the light's good.

I didn't panic yet. Kate's pretty. Liam has eyes. People take photos of their wife's friends sometimes. It's nothing. It's probably nothing.

Photo twenty-one.

Kate in a wedding dress.

My wedding dress.

The Sophia Tolli. Sweetheart neckline. Cathedral train.

Hand-sewn beading catching what looks like evening light through a window I don't recognize.

She's standing in front of a full-length mirror, turned three-quarters, one hand on her hip.

She's smiling. Not for a camera — for someone standing behind the camera. For whoever is taking this photo.

In a room I've never seen.

In my dress.

Before I ever wore it.

I know it's before because the alterations haven't been done.

The hem pools on the floor an extra four inches — my seamstress took it up in March.

The bust is loose at the sides — she darted it on March fifteenth, I remember because I had to reschedule twice.

This photo is pre-alteration. Before March. Which means before the wedding.

Which means Kate wore my wedding dress — in what I'm now realizing is Liam's old apartment, the one on Waverly with the hardwood and the arched mirror — months before I ever put it on.

And Liam took the photo.

* * *

I close my laptop.

I sit very still on the couch for what feels like an hour but is probably forty seconds. The shower is still running. I can hear him in there, humming something tuneless the way he always does.

I open the laptop again. I don't look at photo twenty-one. I look at photo twenty-two.

Kate, same dress, same room. She's laughing now. Her head tipped back. The dress is slipping off one shoulder. Behind her, in the arched mirror's reflection, I can see the edge of someone's arm. A forearm. Male. Reaching toward her.

Photo twenty-three. The dress pooled on the floor. An empty room. The mirror reflecting nothing but hardwood and evening light.

I close the laptop.

I walk to the kitchen. I take out a mixing bowl.

I measure flour — 450 grams, cake flour, sifted twice.

I crack six eggs and separate the whites.

I cream butter until it's pale. I make Swiss meringue buttercream from scratch because it takes forty-five minutes and requires a thermometer and I need something to do with the part of my brain that is currently screaming.

When Liam comes out of the shower, I'm icing a practice tier. He kisses the back of my head. "Can't sleep?"

"Inspiration struck," I say.

"Smells amazing in here."

"Mm."

He goes to bed. I stay in the kitchen until 3 AM, building a cake for a wedding that I'm now not sure was really mine.

* * *

Here's what I know. Here's what I'm trained to see.

A photograph is never just an image. It's data.

Every digital photo carries metadata — EXIF data, they call it.

The date it was taken. The time. The camera model.

The GPS coordinates if location services were on.

The focal length, the ISO, the shutter speed.

I learned this because food photography is my marketing.

I know how to read the story a photo tells beyond what's in the frame.

Tomorrow, when Liam goes to work, I'm going to put that SD card back in my laptop. And I'm not going to look at the photos the way a wife looks at them — wounded, reacting, crying.

I'm going to look at them the way a photographer does.

Date. Time. Location. Camera model. Who took it, where, when, and how many times.

Because here's what's really making my hands shake under this piping bag — it's not that Kate tried on my dress.

Friends do that, maybe. It's not even that Liam took the photo.

It's that the dress was at HIS apartment.

Pre-alteration. Before March. Which means someone — Kate or Liam or both — took my wedding gown from the bridal shop or from my apartment and brought it to his place. That's not spontaneous. That's planned.

And if it was planned, there might be more. More photos. More planning. More lies.

I pipe another border. Tiny shell pattern. Flawless.

The cake is beautiful. Five tiers of something that will never be cut, never be served, never be celebrated over.

I'll dismantle it in the morning and throw the fondant away.

But right now I need it to exist — this perfect, controlled, beautiful thing — because everything else is falling apart and my hands need to build something that makes sense.

The royal icing is hardening. The lines stay where I put them.

Tomorrow I read the data.

Tonight I build.