Chapter 10
Ten
The gas station bathroom smells like pine cleaner.
I lock the door with a trembling hand and face the mirror. The woman looking back at me is still wearing a wedding dress, which means this is actually happening. I didn’t just have a very specific, very expensive nightmare. I actually did it.
I grip the edge of the stained sink.
Breathe.
My chest isn’t cooperating. Every inhale gets halfway down before a phantom hand clamps around my windpipe and shoves the air back out. The fluorescent light above me buzzes, and the mirror is warped along the edge, making my reflection look fractured.
White silk. Mascara tracks. A veil that’s currently hanging off my head.
The veil.
I reach up with clumsy fingers and start pulling at the tulle, but the pins hold with a spiteful grip.
I pull harder. The veil pulls back.
“Okay,” I whisper, my voice hitching. “Come on. Just… come off.”
It doesn’t. I yank, but a sharp sting tells me I just took a clump of hair with it. The yellowed walls of the bathroom are closing in. The mirror is showing me a stranger in a dress that feels like a straitjacket, and I can’t breathe.
Three knocks.
“Piper?” Griffin says softly.
I stare at the door.
“I’m fine,” I choke out. It’s the biggest lie I’ve told all day, and considering I almost said I do, that’s saying something.
“You don’t sound fine.”
“I can’t—” My voice cracks, sounding small and pathetic. “I can’t breathe, and this veil is trying to kill me.”
Silence for a beat. “Can I come in?”
I look at the lock, then at my reflection, then at the tulle winning the war against my scalp. I stumble over and unlock the door.
Griffin steps inside, and the room is suddenly about four sizes too small. Griffin is a lot of man—broad shoulders, a head taller than me, the kind of build that comes from taking care of your body. He’s still in his dress shirt, sleeves shoved up to his elbows, surveying the wreckage of my face.
His eyes settle on the veil. Without a word, he crosses the three feet of linoleum and gently takes hold of my hair.
“It’s pinned,” I tell him, my voice trembling.
“I can see that, Pipes.”
“There are like a hundred of them.”
His fingers move with a dexterity that shouldn’t belong to hands that large. He locates the first pin and works it loose.
“Hold still,” he tells me.
I flinch as a pin scrapes my scalp. “Ow.”
“I’ve got it. Just breathe.”
He works with more patience than I deserve, extracting the pins one by one. I shut my eyes, leaning into the warmth of his hands because I’ve used up every ounce of my dignity, and I have nothing left to prove.
Finally, the veil comes free. He holds the cloud of white for a second before setting it on the edge of the sink.
I look at myself. Without the tulle, I just look like a woman in a wedding dress at a gas station. It’s a more honest version of the truth.
I still can’t take a full breath.
“What do you want to do, Pipes?”
The question is simple. The answer isn’t.
He’s looking at my reflection, waiting for me to catch up to my own life.
“I guess… I guess I need to go back.”
“Okay.”
“Or maybe I don’t?”
His eyebrows lift. “Okay.”
I turn to face him. He’s watching me with those steady, gray eyes. I realize then why he always carries that stillness. He doesn’t feel the need to fill the silence he doesn’t own.
“Can you just make the choice for me?” I ask, the words tumbling out. “Right now. Just tell me what to do.”
He holds my gaze for a long beat before shaking his head.
No.
Right. Of course not. Because I’m the only one who can decide.
Hasn’t that been the whole problem? How long has it been since I made a choice that wasn’t a performance?
I chose the “right” man and then remade my entire personality to fit the negative space around him.
I called it a compromise. I called it growing up.
I start pacing. It’s a three-step-turn kind of bathroom, but I do it anyway.
“I just left my own wedding,” I say, the panic rising again. “I stood in front of three hundred people, and I ran. What kind of person does that? I’ve been planning this for eighteen months. We have a lease, Griffin. All his things are in that apartment. All my things are in that apartment.”
Three steps. Turn.
“Everyone was there. His mother. God, his mother is going to have a field day. She’s never thought I was enough for him, and I just handed her the win on a silver platter.”
Three steps. Turn.
“And my family… Mom is going to be devastated. She cried twice before breakfast because she was so happy.” I’m crying properly now, the tears hot and messy on my cheeks.
“I should go back. I should call Ezra and explain that I just had a moment, and we should talk about this like adults, and he’s going to be—”
You couldn’t even do a wedding right.
His voice. I can hear it as clearly as if he’s standing next to me. He’d arrange the facts until I was the only variable that didn’t make sense.
You embarrassed us, Piper. Again.
My throat closes. I know that conversation. I’ve lived it a dozen times in different rooms.
How do you walk back into a life where you’re always the problem?
My breathing is gone. It’s just shallow, useless hitches. I don’t even realize I’m scratching at my forearm until my nails leave red tracks against the skin. I can’t stand the dress. I can’t stand being in this skin.
“Stop.” Griffin’s hands are on my arms. “Piper. Stop.”
I look down at the red lines on my skin. The sight of them brings me back to the buzzing light, the pine cleaner, the reality of the room. Griffin isn’t gripping me hard, but he isn’t letting go, either.
“Hey.” His voice is a low rumble. “You’re okay.”
My vision blurs as I look up at him. “I can’t go back.”
It’s the first true thing I’ve said in years.
I can’t go back.
He looks at me for a long moment. “Then we don’t go back.”
I blink. “We?”
“Technically,” he says, “I’m on vacation.”
Guilt hits me like a physical blow. “Oh, God. I’m ruining your vacation. You had plans.”
“I didn’t have plans. That was the point. No plans.”
“You had to have something—”
“I was going to look at my ceiling for a few days and maybe find a beach. Nothing interesting was going to happen. This is interesting. Don’t apologize again.”
I close my mouth. He’s looking at me with that calmness I don’t think he learned. I think he was born with it.
I slap his arm because it’s the only way I know to process the emotion.
“That’s not comforting,” I tell him.
The corner of his mouth twitches. He looks at my face, at the small, helpless curve of my lips.
“That’s better,” he says.
I exhale. “My family.”
“I talked to Noah before I came in here. Told him I had you.”
The knot in my chest loosens. “They aren’t… they aren’t mad, are they?”
“I don’t think they care, Pipes. As long as you’re okay.”
I look at the ceiling.
“Do you want to keep driving?” he asks.
The reasonable answer is no. The adult, face-your-consequences answer is to call Ezra, go back to the apartment, and deal with the wreckage of my life like a grown woman.
My head is moving before I can stop it. Nodding.
Yes.
Not because I’m not terrified. I’m vibrating with it. But I don’t have the strength to deal with the fallout. I need air. I need the road. I need the mercy of forward motion where I don’t have to hear the echo of my own failure.
I just need to breathe.
“I can’t go back,” I say again. “Not yet. I know I have to face it, but I just need… I need—”
“Time?” he supplies.
“Yes.”
He nods, decisive. “Then we keep driving.”
He picks up the veil from the sink and holds the door open.
I take one last look at the warped mirror and the woman in a ruined wedding dress. She looks like she just made the most terrifying decision of her life.
She also looks, for the first time in three years, like Piper.