Chapter 5: Two Hundred Guests
The hallway outside the dressing suite was empty.
Ethan was gone.
I could hear the distant sound of the quartet drifting up from the ballroom — something slow and classical that had probably been chosen months ago from a carefully curated list.
Below us, two hundred people sat in white chairs with programs in their laps, checking their phones, leaning toward each other to whisper.
I found Ethan at the end of the corridor, near a tall window that looked out over the side garden.
He was standing with his back against the wall, jacket still on, bow tie still slightly crooked.
He had his phone in his hand but wasn't looking at it.
I stopped a few feet away.
"You don't have to say anything," he said.
"I know."
He looked out the window.
A groundskeeper was moving slowly along the far hedge with a pair of shears, completely unaware that twenty feet above him a wedding was unraveling.
"How long have you known?" Ethan asked.
"That she was like this."
"I've seen things," I said carefully.
"I didn't know the extent of it."
"You stayed quiet."
"You loved her."
He turned his head and looked at me.
His eyes were dry.
That was the part that hurt most.
Ethan had cried at his father's funeral.
He had cried the night David was diagnosed.
He had cried once, quietly, in my kitchen two years after, when he found one of David's old sweaters in the coat closet.
He was not a man who hid from grief.
The fact that he wasn't crying now told me the grief hadn't arrived yet.
He was still in the part that comes before it.
"I kept telling myself you were being overprotective," he said.
"That you couldn't let go."
"I know."
"She told me that.
Regularly."
"I know that too."
He pushed off the wall and walked a few steps, then stopped.
"She was researching your will, Mom.
While you were helping plan this wedding.
While you were driving here to sign the contract."
"Yes."
"That's not — that's not someone who was nervous about a future mother-in-law.
That's someone who was calculating."
I didn't answer.
He didn't need me to.
His phone buzzed.
He looked at the screen.
"That's her father.
He's been downstairs for twenty minutes wondering what's happening." He turned the phone face-down against his thigh.
"I don't know what to tell him."
"You don't have to decide everything right now."
"Two hundred people are sitting in that ballroom."
"They'll wait."
"At some point someone is going to come looking."
"Let them."
He looked at me.
Something shifted in his face — not quite a smile, but the memory of one.
"You're very calm."
"I spent twenty-three years managing fourth graders in crisis," I said.
"This is familiar territory."
He made a sound.
Almost a laugh.
Then it faded.
"I loved her," he said.
"I want you to know that.
Whatever she did — I did love her."
"I know you did."
"That makes it worse, somehow."
"It usually does."
He was quiet for a moment.
Down the hall, the door to the dressing suite was still closed.
I could hear nothing from inside it.
"What do I do?" he asked.
It was the question he had been circling for the last twenty minutes.
I had been waiting for it.
"That's yours to answer," I said.
"Not mine."
"Mom."
"Ethan.
I will support whatever you decide.
But I won't decide it for you.
I never have."
He looked at the closed ballroom doors at the far end of the corridor.
Beyond them, the quartet had shifted to something brighter.
Someone down there had probably started to worry.
"If I walk in there," he said slowly, "and I say the wedding is postponed — what happens?"
"People go home."
"And Madison?"
"That's a different question."
"I know." He ran one hand through his hair.
The carefully combed piece fell forward again.
"Lauren said there was something else.
Something she hasn't told me yet."
I had been hoping he hadn't caught that.
"She said before the day was over, you needed to know," I said.
"What is it?"
"She didn't tell me."
He straightened.
His jaw set.
"I need to talk to Lauren."
He started back toward the dressing suite.
Then the door opened before he reached it.
It wasn't Lauren who stepped out.
It was Madison.
She had fixed her makeup.
Her veil was in place — the one I had repaired.
She was holding her bouquet.
She looked, from a distance, exactly like a bride.
She looked at Ethan.
Then at me.
"There are two hundred people downstairs," she said.
"And I think we all know that whatever Lauren told you, she told you her version of it." She took one step toward him.
"I made mistakes.
I know that.
But Ethan — I love you.
I have always loved you.
And I am asking you, right now, to walk downstairs with me and let us start our life."
Ethan didn't move.
Madison extended her hand.
And from inside the dressing suite, Lauren's voice came through the open door, quiet and very clear.
May you like
"Ethan.
There's something you need to see."
