1. Bella #2
Suddenly my head rears up, my eyes swinging to Sarah’s desperately. My hands cling to her shoulders like a vice on either side.
“I have to talk to him,” I say in a strange voice that I hardly recognize as my own. My eyes are wild. “I have to talk to Marcus.”
Sarah winces, eyes darting around. “Honey, I don’t think-”
“I need to find him,” I say, my voice rising with panic before she can finish her thought. “He’s here somewhere. He has to be. He wouldn’t just-”
I can’t finish the sentence. Won’t let myself finish it.
“Bella, please,” Amee says gently, reaching for my arm. “Let’s go to the bridal suite. We can figure this out there. You don’t need to-” she cuts off, looking around pointedly at the watching crowd.
You don’t have to crash and burn like this in front of the whole world, is what she was going to say.
But I’m already moving, gathering my skirts in my hands and stepping down from the altar. The train of my dress catches on something - a chair leg, maybe, or the edge of the runner - and I hear the delicate sound of fabric tearing. I don’t care.
I have to find Marcus. There has to be an explanation.
This is our wedding day. Our wedding day.
He proposed to me on a beach in Santorini at sunset, got down on one knee in the sand and told me I was the only woman he’d ever love.
He cried when I said yes. He held me all night and whispered plans for our future against my hair.
He wouldn’t do this. He couldn’t.
I push through the crowd, ignoring the hands that reach out to stop me, the voices calling my name. I can hear Sarah and Amee behind me, trying to catch up, but I’m faster, driven by a desperate need to understand what’s happening.
The ballroom doors seem miles away. I can feel the weight of every pair of eyes in the room on my back, can imagine what they’re thinking, what they’ll say about this day for years to come.
Poor Isabella Hayes, left at the altar in that beautiful dress.
Did you hear what happened? Can you imagine the humiliation?
I burst through the doors and into the hotel corridor, my heels clicking frantically on the marble floor.
The Grandview is a maze of elegant hallways and private rooms, and Marcus could be anywhere.
The groom’s suite is on the third floor.
Maybe he’s gone back there. Maybe he’s sick, or having a panic attack, or-
My phone. I need my phone.
I left it in the bridal suite, tucked away in my clutch because Diane insisted that brides shouldn’t carry phones down the aisle. “It ruins the aesthetic,” she had said primly.
The bridal suite is on the second floor. I find the elevator and jab the button repeatedly, my breath coming in short gasps. When the doors finally open, I practically fall inside, punching the button for the second floor with shaking fingers.
The elevator seems to move in slow motion.
I catch sight of myself in the mirrored walls and barely recognize the woman staring back at me.
My carefully styled hair is already coming loose, dark strands escaping from the elegant updo.
My makeup, applied by a professional artist this morning, is smudged around my eyes. I look wild, desperate.
I look like a woman whose world is falling apart. And as I should.
The elevator dings, and I run down the hallway to the bridal suite. The door is still propped open from when we left earlier, champagne flutes and makeup scattered across the vanity, my clutch sitting on the settee where I left it.
I grab the phone with trembling hands and pull up Marcus’s contact.
My finger hovers over the call button for just a moment - some part of me still hoping this is all a terrible misunderstanding, that he’ll answer and explain everything and we can go back downstairs and get married and everything will be fine.
I press call.
The phone rings once. Twice. Three times. With each ring, my heart sinks further. He isn’t going to answer. Somehow I know he isn’t going to answer. He’s left me at the altar and now he isn’t even going to-
“Hello?” a deep voice sounds on the other end.
Marcus’s voice, so familiar and yet somehow strange, floods through the speaker. My knees go weak with relief.
For a second I don’t say anything. I take a moment to hurriedly fix myself up, get myself together somehow. I get an idea just when Sarah and my mother of all people come careening into the room.
I glare at them, holding a hand up for them to stay back and be quiet. Because for my plan to work, I need to concentrate. And I need silence. My plan is to fake him out, like I don’t know he’s stood me up.
Then maybe he’ll tell me more.
I turn away from them and smooth my dress down with sweat dampened palms, avoiding looking at myself in the mirror again. I swallow a few times and ignore the rustling of my mother and Sarah’s feet, ignore the fact that they’re blatantly and openly eavesdropping.
“Hey babe,” I say, working my voice to say the words like I’ve said hundreds of times before.
There’s a pause.
“Hey babe?” he asks incredulously.
“What’s going on?”
“You called me.”
I curse to myself inwardly. “Right, I did.” I can’t breathe, can barely speak. All I can think is he’s not here and he should be and I want to know why. “Is everything okay?”
Static cuts into the connection. Then his voice comes again, weary, cautious.
“What do you mean?”
I take a deep breath, wander a few feet further from my mom and friend. My voice drops low, embarrassment creeping up. I feel so nervous.
“I mean it’s our wedding day,” I say, hearing the hitch of emotion in my voice. “So when I walk down that aisle, are you going to be there waiting for me?”
The question whispers out of me, like a trail of smoke. Thin and barely even there. I wait for what feels like a lifetime for him to answer. Part of me doesn’t think he even will.
I hold my breath.
Then finally comes the verdict, the words I never wanted to hear him say, but that I was afraid he would.
“Listen, no, I’m not. But listen to me.”
“Marcus,” I gasp, sounding choked.
If I didn’t know any better I would think I didn’t know the truth either and this is the first I’m hearing it.
“Listen to me,” he all but pleads, some commotion on his end like he’s slamming the palm of his hand onto some flat surface in frustration. “You never listen to me!”
The words slow down like I’m hearing them in slow motion.
And then I snap.
“Marcus! Oh my God, that’s enough, where the hell are you? Everyone’s waiting, I’m waiting, what happened? Are you okay?” The words tumble out in a rush, tripping over each other in their urgency and surprisingly, their anger.
The humiliation of standing there with my stupid bouquet hits me again and I hurl the flowers across the room. They slam into the wall and my mom and Sarah jump. They cover their mouths in horror but in my eyes my rage burns.
“Enough! Where the hell are you?” I repeat. “Say something.”
My tone changes so much between one sentence to the next. One second I’m wildly angry. The next, begging him.
There’s a pause on the other end of the line. Another one. A longer pause. I can hear breathing, can hear what sounds like traffic in the background. He’s outside. He’s left the hotel.
And maybe I’m nuts, but I swear I hear a female voice.
He’s left me. He’s gone.
“Marcus?” My voice is smaller now, uncertain. “Baby, what’s going on? Talk to me.”
“Baby,” someone echoes mockingly.
Another pause, even longer this time. And then, in a voice completely devoid of emotion:
“I left.”
Two words. Just two words, delivered in a flat monotone that I’ve never heard from him before. No, not my Marcus. He usually talks to me with love.
“You… what? What do you mean you left? Left where? Marcus, I don’t understand-”
“I left,” he repeats, and this time there’s something in his voice. Not regret, not apology. Something harder. Something final. “I’m sorry, Bella. I can’t do this.”
I don’t believe this. I don’t believe what I’m hearing, or what he’s telling me right now. I’m living in delusional land, where nothing that I’m hearing in real time is even registering in my mind.
“Can’t do what? I don’t understand,” I laugh a little maniacally. “Marcus, we’re getting married. Everyone’s here. Your mother is here, my parents are here, we have a whole room full of people waiting-”
“I know.” A dreadful pause. This time I don’t seek to fill it. “But I am still not marrying you. I’m sorry.”
And then the line goes dead. He hung up on me.
I stare at the phone in my hand, at Marcus’s name still displayed on the screen, at the call duration ticking up even though he’s no longer there. Thirty-seven seconds. My entire world collapsed in just thirty-seven seconds.
For a second I stand there numbly. Someone makes a sniffling noise and I suddenly snap out of it, my hands fumbling for the phone right when it’s about to fall out of my hands and to the floor.
I try to call back. The phone rings and rings and rings, eventually going to voicemail. Marcus’s cheerful recorded voice - “Hey, you’ve reached Marcus Webb, leave a message and I’ll get back to you” - feels like a slap across the face.
I call again. Voicemail.
Again. Voicemail.
Again.
“Bella?”
I spin around to find Sarah and Amee in the doorway, both looking at me with such profound pity that I want to scream.
“He left,” I hear myself say, my voice sounding distant and strange. “He said he left. He said he can’t do this.”
“Oh, honey.” Sarah moves toward me, arms outstretched, but I step back.
“No. No, there has to be more to it. He wouldn’t just leave. Not like this. Not without explaining. I need to find him. I need to-”
I’m moving again, pushing past my bridesmaids and back into the hallway. I can hear them calling after me, but their voices seem to come from very far away. Everything feels distant now, muffled, like I’m moving through water.