7. Paige #2
Every clue I gathered. Every trap I set, every midnight page in the notebook, eight weeks of being the smartest woman at every table - and it was the last eight weeks of a fifteen-year lie.
I didn’t catch them. I caught the tail of something that has been swallowing my whole adult life since before it started, and the ground under the altar isn’t ground at all, it never was, and-
Behind me: a thud.
My father’s voice, cracking - “Ellen!” - and I turn to see my mother sliding out of her chair in her beautiful sage dress, white as paper, my father catching her on the way down.
“Someone call 911!”
The lawn erupts. Phones everywhere - to call for help, and to document, my humiliation and my mother’s collapse captured in landscape and portrait both - and Cole’s hand closes on my elbow, too tight, his face doing complicated work, guilt and panic and possibly relief, the look of a secret grown too big to keep carrying.
“Paige. Let me explain.”
“You heard my vows,” I say. “There’s nothing left to explain.”
That’s when Wes moves.
He’s been a statue through all of it, best man at the end of the row, and I turn in the chaos and find him already looking at Cole with an expression I’ve never seen on his face. It looks like murder. And underneath the murder, something worse.
He’s not surprised.
Not by any of it - not the vows, not the faucet, not the blue dress on its feet.
My eyes find his across the wreckage and the truth arrives whole: he knew.
Steady Wes, coffee-order Wes, porch-rail Wes - you were quiet tonight - he knew, and the ledger behind his eyes at Sunday dinner was the same ledger as mine, and neither of us said one word to the other.
He steps forward through the panicking crowd, straight for his brother, and grabs him by the collar of his perfect suit in front of the whole crowd and God knows how many rolling cameras.
“I told you to confess.” Loud enough for the front rows; recognition ripples through the nearest guests. “I gave you until today.”
Cole’s face goes gray. “You don’t understand-”
Wes pulls back his fist.
The sound of his knuckles connecting is one I’ll hear in my nightmares for the rest of my life - no movie crack, just a dull, meaty thud - and Cole stumbles backward into the altar arrangements with his lip split, and Maria is screaming “Wesley, stop!” and the groomsmen surge forward to grab Wes and their faces are doing strange work, agreement underneath the obligatory restraint, and I am already moving.
Away. Just away. Down the side path in my ivory dress, heels catching on flagstone then gravel, and behind me-
“Paige! Paige, wait-”
He catches me in the parking lot, lip bleeding onto the white shirt, and I spin on him with eight weeks of composure finally, gloriously, off its leash.
“Let go of me.”
“Please.” The word sounds genuine, which is the worst part. “You knew - you KNEW, for weeks, and you let me stand up there - God, Paige, do you understand what you just did to us in front of-”
“Explain the before part.” My voice comes out with edges I’ve never heard in it.
“The texts I could survive. The Tuesdays, the toolbox, hole nine - I had all of it, Cole, I’ve had it for two months, I was ready.
But before the wedding. She introduced us.
You married me as a costume.” The slap lands before I decide on it, splits my palm on his watch, a bright sting cutting through everything, and he staggers back with a red print blooming over the blood.
“Fifteen years. My whole marriage was her idea.”
“It wasn’t like that - the moment I met you, everything changed - Tara was-”
“Standing behind me at the mirror this morning.” My voice drops, and the drop scares him more than the slap did. “Zipping me into this dress. Both of you let me plan a party for a marriage that never existed.”
Movement behind him. Tara, approaching over the gravel with her hands still on her middle, mascara wrecked, and I hold up one finger and she stops like the finger is loaded.
“Not today,” I tell her. “Fifteen years, you owed me one true sentence, and you spent it in front of a lawn full of strangers. So no. Not today.”
“Mrs. Aldridge?” A woman from the coordinator’s team hovers at the lot’s edge. “We have a car, if you need-”
“She’s coming with me.”
Wes. At the edge of the parking lot with his knuckles bloody, my purse in one hand and my overnight bag in the other, and he doesn’t look at his brother, doesn’t look at Tara, just walks past them both like weather and opens the passenger door of his truck.
I should ask where he’s taking me. I should ask what he knew and when and why the two people keeping the same secret never once compared notes.
I get in the truck.
Gravel sprays. The vineyard shrinks in the mirror - Cole on his knees in the lot, blood on white, Tara standing over him with one hand reaching for his face, the two of them finally, publicly, exactly what they always were.
“How long have you known?” I ask the windshield.
Wes’s hands tighten on the wheel, knuckles raw. “Suspected three years. Confirmed six months ago.” A mile marker goes by. “You?”
“Eight weeks.”
He absorbs that the way he absorbs everything, silently, structurally, a man testing whether the beam will hold. Then, quietly: “The notebook. At Sunday dinner you said you were ready for it to be over. You’d already written it.”
“Every word.”
“Eight weeks, Paige.” His jaw works. “We sat on that porch. We could have-”
“Don’t.” The word comes out cracked down the middle. “Don’t you dare say it. I ran the same math every single night. There’s no version where either of us says it out loud that ends better than today did. It just ends sooner.”
He doesn’t argue. The sun sets fully, gold going gray going gone, and the highway gives way to mountain roads I don’t recognize, and my mother is stable - Maria texts him, he reads it at a red light, stress episode, they’re keeping her overnight, she’s going to be fine - and I sit in a four-thousand-dollar dress with a dead ring finger and eight weeks of victory that lasted four minutes.
I don’t ask where we’re going.
Right now, anywhere that isn’t back there feels like enough.