“He what?” A cold, brittle numbness creeps up my arms and across my heart.
“He ran off with a stripper—one of the ladies he met here tonight.” Now that he’s said it once, he seems to have no problem saying it again. I wonder how many details he’ll now be willing to elaborate on and how little I’ll want to hear.
“Wo-ow.” I choke it out like I’ve been kicked in my frozen gut. Because I have.
Tarek rushes to speak. “But there’s absolutely nothing to worry about. Tomorrow will go on without a hitch. I mean, you’ll still get hitched. You know what I mean. Tomorrow we’ll be fine. You’ll be fine. Everyone will be fine. A few of us are going after him now, we’ll bring him back, it’ll all be good.” Tarek’s voice knows it will not all be good, but he’s an investment banker by trade, and he’s in full salesman mode. He wants to convince me.
I look at Kya and see she already knows. And, unlike Tarek who is prepared to take action to fix this, her face has already decided this is something that can’t be fixed.
I hand Kya her phone back while Tarek is midsentence and walk to the closest dark corner. I sink to the floor and bury my face in my hands. The tremors that shudder through my body do nothing to break me from this ice cube I’m now encased in. There’s no way. Just hours ago—moments, it feels like—Liam was in my arms as we faced our future together. What happened since then that would cause him to leave me? The pain squeezes itself all through me, searching for an outlet as I realize the truth.
Liam didn’t run away with a stripper.
He ran away from me and the life we were going to have together.
I’m abandoned. Alone. Half of the whole I was supposed to be.
Because of Tarek.
Chapter Four
It’s been about a week since my happily never after. After donating my reception dinner food to a homeless shelter, my floral centerpieces to a maternity ward, and the four cases of champagne to my Grandpa Eddie’s retirement community, I’m done. I’ve taken the week to wallow. One week which I thought I’d spend on white sand beaches in the arms of the man I loved but have instead spent living on the floor. I’ve embraced—literally—the worn tan carpet of my living room and decorated it with a puddle of tears that’s only growing. Just give me time.
Being vertical is overrated. And something broken in me won’t let me sit on the couch or lie on my bed. No. For a feeling this bad, a pain deeper than I’ve ever felt before, I must be as physically low as I can get. My cheek pressed against the carpet fibers. My hip bone digging into the hard subfloor beneath it. It hurts. Good. I hope I get a bruise. Then maybe my body will start to show a speck of the colossal internal pain squeezing my heart, wringing it inside out.
I pull our engagement picture from under the chair where I hid it earlier this week during Mom and Kya’s mad purge of all things Liam. I run my fingers over the matte surface of the print itself—I took it out of the frame days ago, seeking any way to get closer to him, closer to us, closer to that moment when he still loved me and there was no reason on this beautiful earth to believe that he’d ever stop.
Stroking his face in the picture, I search for some clue in the wide smile, the bright eyes starting to crinkle at the corners, the flop of hair over his forehead that skims the top of his eyebrow. Some inkling that picture-Liam knows what’s going to happen. That days, hours, minutes, what feels like an instant after this picture is taken, he’ll shove the dumb woman—me—away and push the detonator that will explode my life.
A garbled cry that’s probably me rumbles up from the floor, and I shove the picture back under the chair. I think of other pictures, older pictures. Pictures of me from middle school that would show a slightly chubby girl with braces and an overbite. A nerdy girl who’d cut her own bangs—badly. A girl who dreamed of love and snuck romance novels until she was humiliated when her best friend’s brother Tarek found one—The Duchess of Desire—and read a certain salacious scene aloud to her entire seventh grade class. Maybe not the entire seventh grade. But every Washington Middle School student who was in the hallway between classes when the book fell out of my backpack and at Tarek’s feet. Sure, he was the one who got detention, but I was the one who got the shame and the nickname.
Did Tarek somehow show Liam those pictures of unlovable me? Did he somehow convince him that I’m still that pathetic creature? That I never was the beautiful, organized, everything bagel Liam thought I was?
The phone rings near my head, and I answer, both cursing the stupid surge of hope that swells within me and praying it’s justified. Please be Liam.
“Honey, are you doing okay?”
Not Liam. My mother. I swallow down my sob.
“What was that?” My mother’s voice, which had already sounded alarmed, rises in volume so she’s almost shouting. “Do you need me to come over there?”
“No! No, Mom, I’m fine.” I’m not fine, but it had taken four days of the last week to get my mother out of my apartment in the first place. I can’t afford a relapse. Not unless I want an emotional, smothering presence protecting me from the ex-fiancé nobody can even find.
I must do well enough at reassuring her because she moves on to what seems to be the real reason for her call.
“You know how your father and I worry about you.”
“Yes.”
“And we love you. More than anything.”
“Yes. I love you both, too, Mom.”
“I know you do, sweetie, and that’s why we know you’ll want to help keep your wedding from being a complete loss for your father.”
This was almost enough to make me sit up and become vertical again. A complete loss for Dad? “What?”
My mother takes a deep breath, and I can tell she’s strapping on her emotional armor. “It’s just that I talked to Rockmount Hall, and you know how Uncle Joey hosts all those interstate bridge tournaments there? Well, he spoke to them for us and although they won’t refund the rental fee, they’ll let us switch to another date—for free—if it’s in the next ninety days.”
She pauses hopefully as if I’ll rush in to say that I’ll be able to conjure up Liam in that time frame, surely.
“Three months won’t help, Mom.”
She sighs like I’ve deflated her. “You still haven’t heard from him?”
“Not a word.”
“Honey, maybe you could have a party with your friends. Your father and I don’t expect you to get engaged again right away and manage to have another wedding planned.” Although I do think that’s exactly what she hoped a moment ago, and at my refusal is regrouping like a good general.
It’s only been a week since the wedding of my dreams didn’t happen. I’m not yet ready to walk down the aisle. Or throw a party celebrating the fact that I didn’t.
“Mom, I don’t want to go to a party.” I flop over onto my stomach with a grunt and stare at a tuft of matted beige carpet in front of me. It takes a minute, but I manage to comb out some of the fiber strands with my fingernails.
“You don’t have to decide right now, right this minute. You could give it a week, say, and then we could plan the party. I think your father would be really happy to know the money wasn’t completely wasted. You could put a nice spin on it. Call it your liberation celebration.”