10. Louella
— ? —
Louella
The rehearsal dinner was an exercise in psychological warfare disguised as a garden party.
Nora had chosen a historic inn on the Massachusetts coast, all weathered shingles and widow’s walks and the kind of aggressive New England charm that showed up in tourism brochures.
The ceremony would happen in the converted barn tomorrow, but tonight we were arranged on the back lawn like chess pieces, practicing our positions while the catering staff set up for the dinner that would follow.
“Bridesmaids, you’ll enter from the left,” the wedding coordinator announced, clipboard in hand. “Each of you will be paired with a groomsman for the processional. When I call your name, please find your partner.”
I knew what was coming. Had known since Camille pulled me aside yesterday and said, “I’m so sorry, but Nora didn’t feel comfortable changing the pairings this close to the wedding.”
“Louella Duval and Hector Lauder.”
He materialized beside me like a specter summoned by its name. I hadn’t seen him up close since the night I left, a few weeks that felt like a few decades, and the change hit me harder than I wanted to admit.
He looked terrible. Gaunt in a way that suggested missed meals rather than illness, shadows carved beneath his eyes, his suit hanging on a frame that had lost weight it couldn’t afford to lose.
The polished Lauder heir I’d married had been replaced by someone who looked like he hadn’t slept in weeks.
Good, I decided. He deserved to look like hell. He’d put me through it.
“Louella.” His voice was rough. “We need to talk.”
“We really don’t.”
“Please. Just five minutes.”
“The coordinator is waiting.” I turned toward the makeshift aisle, keeping my spine straight and my expression pleasant. “Let’s get this over with.”
We walked the processional in silence, his arm beneath my hand, both of us smiling for the photographer while my skin crawled at every point of contact. When we reached the altar and separated to our respective sides, I felt the absence of his warmth like the removal of a splinter.
Relief. That was relief.
The rehearsal dragged on. Vows were practiced, positions were marked, the minister walked us through the ceremony three times until Nora was satisfied with every detail.
I stood where I was told, smiled when I was supposed to, and ignored Hector’s eyes following me across the aisle like he was memorizing the lines of my face.
“Dinner in thirty minutes,” the coordinator announced. “Everyone can freshen up and meet in the main dining room.”
I was halfway to the bridesmaids’ suite when the sky opened up.
Not rain. That word was too gentle. This was a biblical deluge, the kind of storm that turns day into night and drowns the world in sheets of water so thick you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face.
Lightning cracked across the sky, close enough that the thunder was instantaneous, and every light in the inn flickered once, twice, and went dark.
Screaming. Chaos. The wedding coordinator’s voice rising above the din: “Everyone stay calm! The backup generator will…”
Another crack of lightning. The lights stayed dead.
“…the backup generator is apparently not functional,” she finished weakly.
We stumbled inside by phone flashlight, the bridal party converging in the lobby like refugees. Nora was on the verge of tears. Charlie was on the phone with the power company. Camille was trying to organize candles from somewhere while the inn’s staff scrambled to assess the damage.
“The road’s flooded,” someone announced. “No one’s getting in or out until morning.”
Stranded. All of us, in the dark, in a storm, with my soon-to-be-ex-husband lurking somewhere in the shadows.
“It’ll be romantic,” Nora’s mother said weakly. “Like a rustic adventure.”
The rustic adventure got worse.
“The pipes burst.” Camille appeared at my side an hour later, her face illuminated by candlelight and barely contained panic. “In our room. The entire bathroom is flooded and it’s spreading to the bedroom. They’re trying to contain it but our suitcases are soaked and we can’t sleep there.”
“Where are we supposed to go?”
“That’s the problem.” She looked like she wanted to sink through the floor. “The inn was fully booked for the wedding party. There’s no spare rooms. People are already doubling up and…”
“Camille. Just tell me.”
“The only bed left is in the overflow room. The tiny one in the east wing that they put Hector in because he insisted on having his own space.”
I stared at her. “You’re joking.”
“I wish I were. I tried to find another option, I really did, but everyone else is paired up and there’s literally nowhere else.”
“I’ll sleep in the lobby.”
“On the hardwood floor? In your condition?”
The words landed like a slap. Camille had known since the hospital, had held my hand through the worst of it and sworn to keep my secret, and still it startled me every time she said it out loud, like the pregnancy might evaporate if we weren’t careful with it.
“I’ll sleep in the bathtub,” I said. “If his room even has one.”
“Lou…”
“It’s fine.” It wasn’t fine. Nothing about this was fine. “One night. I can survive one night.”
The overflow room was exactly as terrible as advertised.
Narrow, cramped, barely big enough for the twin bed and ancient armoire that comprised its only furniture.
Hector was already there when I arrived, sitting on the edge of the bed with his head in his hands.
He looked up when I opened the door, and something flickered across his face. Hope, maybe. Or desperation.
“Louella.”
“Don’t.” I dropped my damp overnight bag on the floor. “I’m sleeping in the bathroom. You stay on your side of the door. We don’t talk. We don’t interact. We survive until morning and then we pretend this never happened.”
“Please listen to me. Five minutes. That’s all I’m asking.”
“You had four years to talk to me. Four years of marriage, and you spent the last six months of it practically mute. Now you want five minutes?”
“Ray Mercer found footage.” He pulled out his phone, holding it like it might save us both.
“From the hotel bar that night. I never went to her room, Louella. I was drugged, there was something in my drink, and the footage shows me leaving alone. She cropped a still from it to make it look like something it wasn’t. It’s all here, you just have to look…”
“I don’t want to look.” I said it gently, and that surprised us both. The fight had gone out of me somewhere between the storm and this cramped little room. “Put it away.”
“But it proves…”
“I know what it proves. Or what you think it proves.” I sat down on the edge of the ancient tub, suddenly too tired to stand.
“I think I believe you. About Boston, about her. I don’t have proof and I don’t need it, because I know your face when you’re lying, and this isn’t that.
And if she did what you say she did, I hope it follows her forever.
Her and your mother both. I hope it costs them everything they have. ”
He exhaled like I’d taken a weight off his chest. “Then…”
“Then nothing.” I looked up at him, and there was no anger left in it, just the plain truth I’d carried alone for months.
“That’s the part you still don’t understand, Hector.
Elizabeth isn’t why I left. She was never why.
You want me to be leaving because of the other woman, because that’s a villain you can fight.
Point at her, prove she lied, win me back.
But she didn’t break us. You were already gone.
Months before Boston, before her, before any of this.
I lay in that bed night after night reaching for a husband who wasn’t there, and you never once noticed the reaching. ”
“Louella…”
“Do you know what it felt like to lose baby after baby and grieve alone because you couldn’t even look at me?
” I asked. Not shouting. I was past shouting.
“To host your mother’s parties and smile at your sister’s sneers and wonder if anyone in that family ever saw me as anything but an incubator?
You didn’t have to say a word to abandon me.
You just stopped being there, one silent night at a time, until I was living in a marriage with a ghost.”
“Nothing was wrong with you.” His voice broke.
“Everything was wrong with me. I was afraid. Every time we lost a pregnancy, I watched you shatter, and I didn’t know how to put you back together.
I didn’t know how to be enough. So I stayed away, because watching you hurt was worse than not watching at all.
” He stopped. “That’s not an excuse. There is no excuse.
I failed you. Completely and absolutely, I failed you. ”
For a moment I just looked at him, this hollowed-out man who had finally, too late, found the words.
“I stopped being lonely because of you a long time ago,” I said quietly. “I just got lonely with you instead. She didn’t do that, Hector. She couldn’t have. There was nothing left for her to take.”
He sank back down onto the bed, and for once he didn’t say I know. He just looked at me like he was finally understanding the size of it.
“This baby deserves better than two people who broke each other,” I said. “So I’m going to give it better. Whatever it takes.”
I grabbed my overnight bag and headed for the bathroom.
It was tiny, barely bigger than a closet, with a claw-foot tub that looked at least a century old.
I spread towels in the basin, arranged my bag as a makeshift pillow, and tried to convince myself that sleeping on porcelain was a perfectly reasonable choice.
“Louella.” Hector’s voice came through the door. “Please don’t sleep in there. Take the bed. I’ll sleep on the floor.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine. You’re punishing yourself to avoid being near me, and I don’t…” He stopped. Started again. “I’ll leave. I’ll go sleep in the lobby or the hallway or wherever. Just don’t hurt yourself because you can’t stand the sight of me.”
“I can stand the sight of you.” I leaned against the bathroom door, exhausted in ways that sleep wouldn’t fix. “That’s the problem. I can stand it. I shouldn’t be able to, after everything, but I can.”
Silence from the other side.
Then: “The lights just came back on.”
I hadn’t noticed. The bathroom had no windows, and I’d been operating by phone flashlight. But when I opened the door, the room was blazing with light, and Hector was standing three feet away, blinking in the sudden brightness.
His eyes dropped.
I watched it happen in slow motion, watched his gaze fall from my face to my crossed arms to the curve beneath them that my dress didn’t quite hide. The loose silk that had seemed like such clever camouflage suddenly felt transparent.
“Louella.” His voice was barely audible. “Are you…?”
I didn’t answer.
I didn’t have to.