Chapter 11
Eleven
Griffin
How I ended up here is genuinely beyond me.
Two hours ago, I sat in a church pew next to Noah, silently studying the vaulted ceiling and wondering if my dry cleaning was ready.
Now, I’m doing seventy on a California highway with a runaway bride in my passenger seat and seventeen missed calls on a phone I have facedown in the center console.
Every time it buzzed, Piper’s jaw tightened, and her hands sank further into her lap, so I killed the noise.
I called Noah at the gas station.
His number one concern? Is she safe?
He told me to call if anything changes and hung up.
That was it. The Callahan family’s collective reaction to their daughter walking out of her own wedding seems to be a sense of relief. This tells me everything I need to know about Ezra without any of them having to say a word.
Piper has been mostly quiet during the drive.
She’s not staring blankly into the distance or showing signs of an imminent breakdown.
She’s simply sitting, watching the scenery pass by with the focused attention of someone who remains present because the alternative is whatever’s in the rearview mirror.
I understand that instinct well enough to leave it alone.
Outside, the landscape has changed to a type of California that doesn’t show up on postcards—dry hills, sporadic orchards, and towns that come and go before you can notice them.
I keep coming back to the same thing: this is not the Piper I know.
I’ve been trying to figure it out since the balcony last night. Piper grew up with a certain confidence—the kind that comes when you realize early on that you’re exceptional at something and build your entire identity around it. She was a kid who knew exactly who she was because the music told her.
Today, I watched her spiral into a kind of self-doubt that doesn’t just happen; it’s built. Gradually and deliberately, just like anything structural fails—not from one big break, but from a slow accumulation of small stresses until what was load-bearing can no longer hold.
I see a sign. WELCOME TO OPAL CREEK. POPULATION 4,200.
I take the exit.
Main Street is two blocks of storefronts, a diner, and a clothing boutique with a hand-lettered sandwich board that reads: SUMMER ARRIVALS.
I park and look at Piper. She’s still in the dress, which is a problem we need to solve. She has no proper shoes, no bag, no phone, nothing but the silk on her back and the absolute conviction that she is not ready to go home.
“Okay,” I say.
She looks at me.
“Back in a minute.”
I wait for her to nod before I head inside.
The shop is about the size of a spacious living room, making me feel twice as wide as I really am. Two women are working inside. The woman at the register looks up and greets me with a friendly, “Hi there, can I help you?”
I look around at the rows of clothes arranged in a system I can’t decode. “I need… I actually have no idea what I need.”
She blinks. “Okay.”
“Clothes. For a woman.”
“We do have those,” she says slowly. “What size?”
I open my mouth and find nothing. I think about the approximate dimensions of Piper, but I don’t have that information in any useful format.
I lift a finger. “Can you hold on a minute?”
Walking back outside, I knock on the car window.
I rub the back of my neck. “I need to get you clothes, and I don’t know your size or… any of it. What do you normally wear?”
She blinks at me. “Like, jeans and stuff. Normal things.”
“Right, but what sizes?”
She looks at the shop for a long moment, then wipes a smudge of mascara from under her eyes with the back of her hand and gets out of the car.
“Oh,” I almost choke out. She’s already walking toward the entrance. “Okay. We’re doing this in full bridal. Cool.”
I follow her mainly because I feel responsible for the social earthquake she’s about to cause.
The shop goes quiet the moment she enters. It happens in waves—the woman at the register notices her first, then the woman folding in the back, until the entire space is silent.
Piper stands barefoot in the entrance of the shop, radiating the energy of a woman who has simply run out of fucks to allocate.
The register woman recovers first. To her credit, she moves from shock to professional warmth in two seconds flat.
“Hi,” she greets Piper.
“Hi,” Piper whispers back. “I need clothes.”
There’s a half-second of silence before the woman at the back sets down a stack of shirts and comes forward.
“Oh, honey,” she says.
There’s so much meaning in those two words. It feels like a warm blanket wrapped around your shoulders, and I watch Piper’s face do something it hasn’t done all day. For a moment, her composure slips, and she looks like someone who desperately needed to hear that.
“We’re going to get you sorted,” the register woman says, shooting a look at her colleague.
“Don’t you worry about a thing,” the other one confirms, taking Piper gently by the arm. “What are we thinking? Comfortable? Practical?”
“Both,” Piper manages. “Comfortable and practical. Yes.”
“Come on, then.”
They disappear toward the racks, pulling things down and asking for sizes. Piper tells them quietly, never looking at me.
The register woman turns to me with a firm smile. “There’s a chair by the window. Can I get you anything? Water?”
“I’m good, thank you.”
“You sit tight.”
I sit tight. From across the shop, I watch them work.
Another customer leans over to her companion and whispers behind her hand.
A younger woman near the back is already staring at her phone, almost certainly texting someone about the barefoot bride in the boutique.
By nightfall, the entire population of Opal Creek will know about this.
Fifteen minutes pass before the fitting room curtain opens.
Piper steps out in jeans, a soft sweater, and simple canvas sneakers. The wedding dress is folded over her arm. Her hair is down now—she must have pulled out the rest of the pins—and she looks, for the first time today, like someone wearing clothes that truly belong to her.
“Better?” I ask.
“Yes. Thank you.”
The older woman is already gathering the remaining items and folding them at the register. She glances at me. “She’ll need a few more things. I’ve picked enough for two days.”
“Thanks,” I say, and I mean it.
The total is rung up. Piper shifts the wedding dress to her other arm and reaches for the bag she doesn’t have.
“Shit,” she mutters, her face going red. “I don’t have—I left everything. I don’t have my—”
I hand my card over. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Griffin, I’ll pay you back, I swear, I’ll—”
“Piper.” I look at her until she stops. “Knowing you’re sleeping somewhere tonight instead of a car is payment enough.”
She looks down at the dress in her arms, then back up. The red is still in her cheeks, but there’s relief there too.
As she slides the bag across the counter, the older woman in the back speaks up. “Congratulations?”
It comes out as a question. The only correct instinct.
Piper turns. “We’re not—”
“Thank you,” I say at the same time.
We look at each other. The shop assistants look between us.
“It’s a long story,” Piper says to the shop in general.
“Isn’t it always?” the woman behind the register replies.
Outside, the afternoon has gone soft, the light low and golden. Piper stands on the sidewalk, looking up and down the street.
Neither of us mentions that she’s still clutching the wedding dress. I reach out and take it from her anyway, folding it over my arm. She watches me do it with an expression I don’t examine too closely.
“There’s a hotel two streets back,” I tell her.
She nods.
I hold the dress and look at the street, contemplating bridges and how they’re built to withstand pressure, but even they have a breaking point if not maintained.
I don’t think about the way she looked when the shopkeeper said, “Oh, honey,” and I definitely don’t think about how long it’s been since someone has cared for her properly.