Chapter 6
Chapter Six
When Addison woke up the next morning, her eyes were practically glued shut. Probably because she hadn’t bothered to take her makeup off when she had fallen into bed at the unreasonably early time of seven thirty and shut the blackout curtains in the cabin she was staying in.
A whole cabin.
It was really too generous and too lovely. The cabins were up against the river, beautifully appointed, and spacious. Not that she had been thinking about that too deeply when Walker had moved her into the space last night.
She had been numb by the time she had changed out of her wedding dress and he had given her a ride over to the cabin, where her things had been waiting for her.
He had told her that he would even have her wedding dress taken care of.
It was white-glove treatment in the midst of some pretty horrible treatment.
Today, she actually needed to call her dad, probably her mom, definitely Anna, and Lydia and Denisha.
It made her tired just thinking about it, but everyone had been so gracious and so helpful yesterday.
Though, when she looked at her phone, she wanted to die.
He had told her not to watch the video. He had told her not to doom-scroll, but how could she not?
She opened the app she thought she was most likely to find the video on and typed in cowboy, which auto-completed to Cowboy Lassoes Runaway Groom.
A slow rising horror filled her body as she clicked on the auto-completed result.
And pulled up several different videos from several different angles of the event itself.
She had been right. The worst part was her own face.
She had experienced it, she had lived it, but she hadn’t watched herself live it.
There she was standing in the center of the aisle looking like a shattered marshmallow, staring as her groom ran away.
She clicked on one video that was a supercut, a montage that took the most advantageous angles of every moment and spliced them together. Whatever enterprising soul had done this had even added effects, music, slow motion moments to increase the drama.
It was cinematic, her heartbreak having been viewed millions and millions of times.
The original video was now at fifteen million.
But there were so many more videos besides.
And in all of them, she looked dumbfounded. In all of them, Alan was running away from her like she was a monster.
And in all of them, Walker looked like the hero in an old western movie.
He had that classic Hollywood handsomeness, that laconic leading man ease, and it seemed scripted, it really did.
And in fact, when she clicked open the comment section, she saw that many people were saying that it had to be staged.
But it was her face, her face should be the giveaway. She was no actress, and if she had been acting during all of that, she would’ve been a shoo-in for award season.
She obsessively watched the video, while she made coffee in the coffee maker and went back to bed, holding the phone up to her face as she pored over the expressions on every person visible in the video, and her eyes kept going back to Walker.
Most especially the moment when he scooped her up off the ground like she weighed nothing and rode her away from the wedding, leaving her shoes behind, like some kind of Western Cinderella.
She scrolled through the comments.
I would’ve run too. Fat ugly bitch.
AI.
That poor girl.
This is so sad
My life would be absolutely over if my husband did this to me.
“Well, good thing he didn’t, bitch, or you would be dead,” Addison muttered furiously, scrolling through the comments.
Addison would not be dead.
She had decided that.
It was the strangest thing, because last night when she had told Walker that she was two out of the three things she listed, she had meant it. She hadn’t even thought about it.
But she wasn’t heartbroken.
Because she was just angry.
She didn’t feel devastated; she felt… She didn’t even know what. Like it wasn’t fair that he was the one that had done it. Because if she was honest, if she was really honest, she had been looking for signs that the wedding wasn’t supposed to go forward.
She dropped her phone on the bed and covered her face with her hands.
She hadn’t really wanted to get married.
Or at least, she had hefty doubts, but this felt a lot like being fired when you had been on the verge of quitting.
But you weren’t on the verge of quitting. You were going to follow through with it, because you knew that it was important to everybody else. You had gone too far, and you weren’t going to let anybody down.
That was a terrible reason to get married. A horrible reason to go through with a wedding.
But she just felt… Well, right now she felt numb.
And maybe she didn’t really feel that way.
Maybe she hadn’t actually had doubts, but she was never going to be able to see Alan the same way again because she had just watched a video of him running away from her, a hundred times, from just as many different angles.
How could she ever be sure how she felt? What she might’ve done, what she was actually feeling underneath everything?
She didn’t think she could be sure.
Maybe she was just trying to soothe herself now, with the false idea that part of her had seen it coming or known better or something, because the alternative was to be blindsided.
She decided she had to stop watching the video.
She opened up her other primary form of social media and saw that her private message inbox was bursting full of missives she had no desire to read.
She had media outlets asking her questions, people sending her love.
Oh no.
Her stomach twisted with dread, and she quit scrolling through the box.
He had told her not to doom-scroll. He had told her to take a break. She really needed to do that.
But before that, she decided to call her dad.
“Have you heard from Alan?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “I haven’t. He’s about the only person I haven’t heard from. I have about five hundred messages from everybody else.”
“Well, you disappeared.”
“Kind of not on purpose,” she said. “I was functionally kidnapped.”
“Do I need to call the police?” her dad asked, as maddeningly calm as ever.
“No.”
“Where are you now?”
“I’m still at the ranch. They gave me a complimentary place to stay.” Which wasn’t really kidnapping.
Though, she wasn’t sure that it had been them so much as Walker.
But it was hard to imagine that Walker was being nice to her voluntarily.
While she had imagined, before this week, that the thing she had done had bounced right off like he was Teflon, there had been that moment on the trail ride when she had realized that he just didn’t like her.
And it forced her to think about her most shameful memory.
The time that she’d asked him to prom with no intention of going with him at all.
When she had ghosted him and brought somebody else instead.
Her stomach twisted. Hard.
“Anyway, I had all of my obligations taken care of for the week because I was supposed to be on a cruise, so I thought I would take the opportunity to lay low, let the storm die down a little bit.”
“Well, be aware that that means we’re managing some of the storm.”
For some reason, that made her stomach go tight, made her shoulders tense.
“I do know that. But you can also just not. You can ignore it all.”
“I don’t think it would be for the best.”
“I just… I need a little bit of time.”
“I understand that, Addison, I do, but I was the mayor when your mother left me. There was no taking a break to deal with it.”
Guilt ate at her.
“I do know that, Dad. I’m sorry. But you didn’t have to tell everybody right away either, and in my case, the entire world doesn’t just know; they’ve all seen the video.
In 4K. And it’s really humiliating. I don’t have control over how this gets out or who finds out, because pretty much everyone in town saw it in person, and now a bunch of strangers are watching it through their phones. ”
Her dad sighed. “Yeah. You’re right. I hadn’t really considered that aspect of it. I can see why you might need to lay low until there’s a new viral moment.”
“Anna is working on the campaign, and Walker is going to do some media outreach, because of course having a wedding of this magnitude fall apart at a wedding venue isn’t necessarily great business for him either.”
“Well, I could certainly see how that would be true.”
“I think it’ll be okay.”
That’s what she told everybody, on every phone call.
She decided to call her mom last. She couldn’t guess what her mom’s reaction would be, honestly. She didn’t know her well enough.
“Oh, Addison. I was so worried about you.”
“You don’t need to worry about me,” Addison said.
She found herself biting back comments that weren’t going to help anything right now.
About how her mom hadn’t worried over much about her as a child, and as a result Addison and Jackson had had to deal with everything that had happened to them without her. So, they both were self-sufficient enough to figure it out now.
Certainly Addison was.
Or at least, she had a network. One that hadn’t included her mom for a very long time, because she hadn’t had the luxury of it.
“But I am worried. I keep seeing the video on the news.”
Addison winced. “Oh. Of course. I just can’t believe… I can’t believe anybody is interested in my drama.”
“Well, it’s the cowboy. Everybody’s angling for an interview with him.”
That’s good, too. That she was relegated to supporting character in her own wedding disaster.
Because of course Walker was the main character.
Of course.
“You know you can come and stay with me in California if you want. If you need to get away.”
Addison felt a little bit discomforted by that. Partly because she wanted to go. There was part of her that wanted to pull up stakes, go to California, and disappear forever.
Part of her that wanted to pretend that she had never lived here. That she had never been Addison Carey of Mustang River, Oregon, but that she was just someone else, who lived somewhere else, who had never stood there at her own wedding and watched her groom run far and fast.
Yes, part of her really wanted that.
But she couldn’t do that. Because there were too many people that were counting on her. Because she had to do something to repair this. This horrible deviation from the path that she had been on.
And she still had a campaign. She still believed in everything that she was running for.
It just all felt muddled now.
“I really appreciate the concern and the offer. But I’m laying low at the ranch until my honeymoon would have been over.”
“I’m glad you have support.”
Again, she found it difficult not to say something a little bit biting, and that wasn’t fair.
She was working at having a relationship with her mom; she had been working on it for the last ten years.
It was just… Sometimes she was more successful at it than others, and sometimes her pain felt a little bit closer to the surface. Like now.
“I just wanted to let you know that I was okay, and that I am going to be holing up for a bit.”
“I appreciate it.”
Her mom sounded sad, and her voice sounded small, and Addison didn’t have it in her to make her feel better.
She just didn’t.
She was dealing with beating back anger at both of her parents, which told her that the problem was likely her, and she needed to get a grip.
She worked on it. Eventually, she was hungry and was about to try and figure out something for food when a delivery arrived with a picnic basket full of sandwiches.
There was a mini fridge in the room, and she was able to throw them in there.
At dinner time, a meal arrived with a selection from the restaurant.
They were giving her what amounted to a hermitage.
She couldn’t be more grateful.
She kept on watching the video. Which some would say was excessive, but she wanted to be familiar with it. Because when she emerged from this, she wasn’t going to be decimated, she was going to come out of it stronger. That was very important to her.
In fact, it was the most important thing that she could think of.
About three days after the jilting, it was like she turned a corner, and began strategizing.
She read so many comments. Thousands of comments.
There was no end to the number of comments that she read, and she began to see a theme.
Began to realize exactly what needed to be done.
Because in the middle of all of the old footage from the wedding, there were some new things too.
Interviews with Walker. And in all of the comment sections, women were swooning.
Talking about how the way that he had picked her up in the aisle was the most romantic thing they had ever seen.
The way that he had defended her honor was the most beautiful gesture they had ever witnessed, and there were memes.
In a world of that guy, be this guy.
Don’t be the man who runs, be the one who chases the man down, and then rescues the woman he left behind.
Oh yes, it was becoming more and more clear the longer that she looked at all of this. Maybe she was insane. Maybe the week of isolation had actually damaged her brain, but she didn’t think so.
No.
She was pretty sure that her plan was actually genius.
She texted Anna and confirmed that it was, in fact, brilliant.
Anna agreed, even if she thought it was a little bit risky, but Addison felt like risky was about the only option they had.
Anna felt like risky was something that could work in their favor.
On the last morning, when Walker’s truck pulled up to the front of the cabin to whisk her back to her car, back to reality, she had her entire speech rehearsed.
“Walker, I’ve been thinking about it, and I really don’t see another option,” she said, standing in the doorway of the cabin, arms folded, gaze intent on his.
“Another option to what?”
“To this. This whole situation. My situation. Our situation.”
“And what is that?”
“Walker Grayson, you need to fake date me.”