Chapter 12: The Wedding Weekend
I spent Madison’s wedding weekend out of town on a cheap coastal reservation I paid for with the new card.
Not as theater. As logistics. The city was small enough that mutual acquaintances would have watched my face for material. I owed them nothing. I walked the shoreline, answered the attorney’s one update email, and slept in a room where no one expected me to host a reconciliation. On Saturday evening, while vows were presumably exchanged thirty minutes from my dark porch, I ate takeout on a balcony and watched the tide. My phone stayed in airplane mode until morning.
May you like
Sunday’s public photos reached me through a colleague’s accidental like on a shared feed. I looked once. Madison in white. Mom crying in the front row. Dad upright and proud. Cole steady at the altar. No empty chair staged for me. No speech about missing sisters. The story they preferred did not require my body, only, occasionally, my account number.
I closed the app, checked the bank for new unauthorized attempts—none—and drove home to a furnace that worked and a door that opened only to my key.
