Chapter 2
"You were up late," he says at the door. "The cake looks incredible."
"Testing a new design for the Hartwell wedding."
"You're going to crush it."
He smiles. He means it. That's the thing about Liam — he's not a performer. He genuinely thinks I'm talented, genuinely proud, genuinely happy to come home to a kitchen that smells like vanilla extract and burnt sugar. He's a good man.
A good man whose SD card has forty-three photos on it, twenty-three of which feature my best friend in various states of undress.
The door closes. I wait three minutes — count them on the kitchen clock, watching the second hand crawl — in case he comes back for something forgotten. He doesn't.
I pull out my laptop.
* * *
I don't look at the photos first. I right-click the folder and select Properties.
The card contains 43 JPEG files, total size 1.
2 GB. High resolution — whoever shot these was using a real camera, not a phone.
That tracks with the quality I noticed last night.
Shallow depth of field, consistent white balance, deliberate composition.
Liam doesn't own a camera.
I open the first photo. Right-click. Properties. Details tab.
There it is. The EXIF data.
Camera: Canon EOS R6
Date taken: February 8, 2025
Time: 6:42 PM
GPS: Disabled
February eighth. Four months before the wedding. I was his fiancée and Kate was my maid of honor and on February eighth at 6:42 PM, someone used a Canon EOS R6 to photograph her in our building's courtyard.
The Canon R6 is a $2,500 body. Professional-grade mirrorless. The kind of camera a photographer owns — or borrows from one. I own a Canon R5 myself. It lives in my studio cabinet.
I check my own camera's serial number against the EXIF. Different. This isn't my camera. Someone else's.
Kate has a Canon R6.
I know this because she brought it to the food photography workshop where we met. She was there as a hobbyist — she said she worked in event planning, and photography was her creative outlet. She shoots weddings sometimes, she told me. Freelance. For friends.
Kate took these photos herself. Some of them, at least — the ones where she's not in frame. The twelve building shots, the river trail. She was testing her own camera. And then...
I click forward to photo thirteen. Kate on the park bench, smiling. Someone else is holding the camera now. The angle is slightly lower than Kate would shoot — she's five-eight, and this is taken from about five-ten or five-eleven. Liam is six feet.
Photo fourteen. Kate at the coffee shop, laughing mid-sentence. Same angle. Same height. Same photographer.
My husband took these photos of my best friend, with her camera, four months before our wedding.
* * *
I force myself to go methodically. One photo at a time. I open a spreadsheet — the same template I use to log my cake photography sessions for clients. Columns: file number, date, time, camera, GPS, location (noted from visual context), subject, notes.
Photos 1-12: February 8. Kate's camera. Various outdoor locations I recognize — our neighborhood. Kate isn't in any of these. Test shots.
Photos 13-20: February 8. Kate's camera. Kate as subject. Coffee shop on Briar Street (I recognize the tiled wall). Riverside Park. A restaurant I don't know — dark wood, candle on the table. These are date photos. The kind you take of someone you're showing attention to.
February 8 was a Saturday. I was at the bakery until 9 PM — a rush order, someone's anniversary. I remember because I texted Liam that I'd be late and he said no worries, watching the game with Pete.
Pete. Right.
Photo 21: February 8, 7:58 PM. Kate's camera. Kate in my wedding dress. Liam's old apartment on Waverly — I can tell by the arched mirror, the particular width of the floorboards. He moved out of that place in April, two months before the wedding, when we combined households.
7:58 PM. I was rolling fondant for someone else's anniversary cake. Liam was "watching the game with Pete." Kate was in my dress.
Photo 22: February 8, 8:03 PM. Same room. The dress slipping. The arm in the mirror.
Photo 23: February 8, 8:11 PM. The dress on the floor.
Eight minutes. From wearing it to removing it. Eight minutes is all it took.
* * *
I close the spreadsheet. I walk to the kitchen. I don't bake — I can't, not right now. Instead I do something worse. I open my phone and scroll to my wedding album. The professional shots, the ones our photographer Hannah delivered in a leather-bound USB case.
I find the getting-ready photos. There I am in the bridal suite at Windmere, hair pinned up, robe on. And there's Kate behind me, holding the dress. Lifting it over my head. Her fingers on the zipper.
She'd already worn it. She'd already stood in front of a mirror in this exact gown and smiled for my fiancé and let him photograph her and then let the dress fall to the floor in his apartment.
And then — months later — she picked it up again, hung it in a garment bag, brought it to my bridal suite, and zipped me into it like it was sacred.
Like I was the first.
I wasn't the first.
* * *
The rest of the SD card. Photos 24-43. I force myself back to the laptop.
Photos 24-31: February 22. Two weeks later.
Kate's camera again. Location is different — I don't recognize the room.
Hotel, maybe. Neutral walls, generic art, a king bed with white sheets in the background.
Kate in lingerie. Black. Expensive-looking.
She's posing for someone. Some of these are selfie-angle — arm extended, camera in her own hand.
Some are from across the room. Same five-ten shooter.
Photos 32-38: March 3. Another location. Liam's apartment again — the Waverly place. Kate in regular clothes this time. Jeans, a sweater. Sitting on his couch. Reading something on her phone. Candid. Comfortable. Like she belongs there.
Photos 39-43: March 14. One day before my dress fitting. Kate's camera. Kate in my kitchen — my OLD kitchen, the apartment I had before Liam and I combined. She's making coffee. The mug is mine — the blue one with the chip. She's wearing one of Liam's shirts. I recognize it. The green flannel.
March 14. One day before I went to my seamstress and stood on the platform and let her pin my dress to my exact measurements while telling her I was the happiest person alive.
* * *
I close everything. I eject the SD card. I put it back in the plastic case.
My hands are shaking now. Not the fine tremble I can work through — the kind that makes precision impossible. I couldn't pipe a straight line right now if someone paid me double.
So I do the only thing that makes sense.
I take out a fresh batch of fondant. I knead it until it's smooth. I roll it flat — quarter-inch thick, perfectly even. I cut circles. I stack them. I build a six-inch dummy tier from scratch, and I cover it, and I start piping.
Cornelli lace. The most intricate pattern in my repertoire — continuous curved lines that never cross, never repeat, never touch. It requires total focus. Your hand moves and your brain tracks the negative space and there's no room for anything else.
No room for photo twenty-three. The dress on the floor.
No room for the green flannel shirt.
No room for the way Kate cried at my wedding and I thought it was joy.
I pipe until my hand cramps. Then I switch hands and keep going. The pattern grows — chaotic-looking but perfectly controlled. Every line deliberate. Every curve intentional.
Unlike everything else in my life right now.
* * *
By noon I have three practice tiers covered in cornelli lace and a decision.
I'm not going to confront Liam. Not yet — not until I know everything.
Because here's what I've learned from reading forty-three photos: this wasn't a single moment of weakness.
February 8 to March 14 — that's five weeks.
Five weeks of dates, photos, lingerie, my apartment, his apartment, hotel rooms, my mug, his shirt.
Five weeks while I was planning a wedding with both of them.
But the photos stop on March 14. Nothing after that. No April. No May. Nothing from the wedding day itself or the months after. Either it ended — or the evidence moved somewhere I haven't found yet.
I need Kate's side — not by asking her, but by looking. If she took these photos on HER camera, she has copies. She has the originals. And digital photos leave trails. Cloud backups. Social media uploads with stripped metadata but recoverable timestamps. Google Photos, iCloud, Dropbox.
Kate shares her Google Photos album with me. Has for two years. We share food pics, event shots, silly selfies. I never looked closely at what else is in there.
I'm going to look now.
My hands have stopped shaking. The cornelli lace is flawless.
I open my phone. I open Google Photos. I tap on Kate's shared album.
And I start scrolling.