Chapter 9: The Email Four Days Before the Wedding
I read the email twice before I understood what I was looking at.
Then I read it a third time, slowly, the way you read something when part of you is still hoping you've misread it.
I hadn't.
---
*Dana,*
*I know you said you needed space and I'm going to respect that.
But I need to say this once so it's said.*
*I'm getting married on Saturday.
I've made my choice and I'm not going to change it.
But I want you to know that what we had was real.
It was always real.
I didn't handle it well and I'm sorry for that.*
*If things had been different — if the timing had been different — I don't know.
I can't answer that.
But I think you deserve to hear that it wasn't nothing.
You were never nothing.*
*I hope you find someone who gives you everything you deserve.*
*— Ian*
---
I set the phone on the table.
Carrie leaned forward.
"What does it say?"
I turned the phone so she could read it.
She read it.
Her face went through several things in quick succession.
"He wrote this four days before the wedding," she said.
"Yes."
"While you were — what were you doing four days before the wedding?"
I thought about it.
"Picking up my dress.
We had the rehearsal dinner that evening."
Carrie set the phone down.
"He sent her a love letter four days before he married you."
"He would say it's not a love letter."
"What would he call it?"
I looked at the email again.
*What we had was real.
It was always real.* "Closure," I said.
"He'd call it closure."
"And what do you call it?"
I picked up my mug.
The tea had gone lukewarm.
I drank it anyway.
"I call it the answer to every question I've been asking all morning," I said.
Carrie sat back.
She was quiet for a moment, which was unusual for her.
Carrie was not a quiet person.
When she went quiet, it meant she was choosing her words carefully.
"You know what strikes me," she said finally.
"It's not that he wrote it.
It's the line — *if things had been different, if the timing had been different, I don't know.* He married you and he still didn't know."
I had noticed that line too.
"He chose you," Carrie said.
"But he didn't close the door.
He left it open just enough to feel like he hadn't really lost her."
"And she forwarded it to me."
"Why do you think she did that?"
I thought about Dana at the coffee bar that morning.
The untouched cup.
The way she'd watched the elevator doors.
The steadiness of her voice when she said *I spent two years being managed.*
"Because she's done being managed too," I said.
"She's not trying to get him back.
She's trying to get out from under it."
Carrie nodded slowly.
"So what now?"
My phone lit up again.
Ian.
The fourth call.
I looked at it.
Then I picked it up and answered.
"Where are you?" he said immediately.
His voice was tight.
Controlled, but barely.
"I'm at Carrie's."
"You left without telling me."
"I told you I was going to Carrie's."
"You didn't say you were leaving right then.
I came back from the bathroom and you were gone." A pause.
"I've been calling."
"I know."
"Did you get my calls?"
"Yes."
Silence.
"Ian," I said.
"I got the email."
A longer silence.
"What email," he said.
But his voice had changed.
"The one you sent Dana four days before our wedding.
She forwarded it."
Nothing.
Just the sound of him breathing.
"You told her what you had was real," I said.
"You told her if the timing had been different, you didn't know.
Four days before we got married."
"That's not—" He stopped.
Started again.
"That's not what that meant."
"Then tell me what it meant."
"It meant I was trying to give her closure.
I was trying to be kind."
"You told her you didn't know."
"I was—" His voice cracked slightly.
"I was trying to end it cleanly.
I didn't want her to feel like she'd been discarded."
"But you didn't know," I said.
"That's what you wrote.
You didn't know."
He didn't answer.
"Ian." My voice was very quiet now.
"Do you know?
Right now, today, the morning after our wedding — do you actually know?"
The silence stretched out.
And in that silence, I got my answer.
Not from anything he said.
From the four seconds it took him to say anything at all.
"I love you," he said finally.
"I chose you."
"I know you did," I said.
"But I need to know if you chose me because you wanted to.
Or because the timing worked out."
He didn't say anything.
"I'll call you tomorrow," I said.
"I need tonight."
I ended the call before he could respond.
Carrie was watching me from across the table.
"Well?" she said.
"He didn't answer," I said.
"I asked him directly and he didn't answer."
She reached across and refilled my mug from the pot without being asked.
"Then you have your answer," she said.
I looked at the steam rising from the cup.
Outside, the afternoon light was shifting.
The day was moving on without me, the way days do when everything inside has stopped.
May you like
Somewhere across the city, Ian was standing in a hotel room with two packed bags and a honeymoon itinerary and a wedding ring on his finger.
And I was sitting at my sister's kitchen table, trying to figure out what kind of woman I was going to be from here.
