Revenge14 min read
The Wedding That Never Was
ButterPicks13 views
I remember the promise like the warm weight of a ring on my finger.
"Harrison said he'd give me a proper wedding," I told the mirror, tying a ribbon at the back of my hair. "He said he was sorry he never did before. He said I would be the most beautiful bride."
"You're already beautiful, Vera," Faith said, squeezing my shoulder from behind. She had come early to help; she was always early when life tilted. "Don't worry. It'll be perfect."
I smiled because the mirror wanted it of me and because Harrison had said it. I believed him because we'd been married five years and because he had kept so many small promises when the world was loud and raw.
Then the WeChat pinged.
"He looked at his phone," I said later, telling the memory out loud like a small child counting stars. "He looked at his phone and then he ran."
"Run where?" Faith asked, peeling an orange, her hands confident and quick.
"Somewhere he said was more urgent than my wedding."
"He wouldn't—" Faith stopped herself.
I had seen the message first. I saw the sentence on the screen before he did. The words were flat and final: "Vera, I won't disturb your life anymore. Are you satisfied?"
"Who sent that?" Faith wanted to know.
"I didn't show it to him," I said. "I watched him read it. His face went wrong. He left. He shut the car door. He didn't look back."
"Maybe it's a mistake," Faith said.
"Maybe," I echoed, and the word, like a cracked coin, had no value.
I was in my strapless mermaid gown. The fabric hugged my body and the hem dragged along the dusty pavement. When I pushed the front door open to chase him, the gown caught and I almost fell. I hit the frame with my knee. Pain bloomed hot and clean.
"Harrison!" I shouted. "Harrison, wait!"
He didn't answer. He never did when the truth was smaller than the lie he could tell.
"Vera, sit down," Faith urged, but the bridesmaids were already watching, the guests squinting from under umbrellas. The photographer clicked, confused. People waited for the couple to appear and speak and smile. I was the spectacle that wasn't planned.
"Is he okay?" Nicole Barrett asked, trying to laugh it into the room.
"Of course," I lied, because I had learned how to make the body go through a scene even when the heart wanted to stop.
My mother phoned and she was furious before the greeting ended.
"How could you be thinking about a wedding when your cousin is bleeding out?" Lillian Ross shouted down the line.
"What cousin?" I asked because my mouth had stopped working right.
"Your cousin Kali," my mother said. "She tried to kill herself on the school roof. You couldn't care less!"
"She—" I began.
"Where are you? Are you at your wedding? Are you having the nerve?" my mother barked. "You ungrateful girl, your sister is dying and you stand there—"
I let the phone drop and the plastic clattered like small, mean teeth. My mother's voice blurred into background noise: she had always been loud, capable of turning any room into a courtroom.
"It's my fault," I said to Faith without thinking. "Everything is my fault."
"Stop," Faith said. "Don't say that."
I had known Kali Hayes in the way a house knows a shadow. She was my cousin who had been taken in when her parents died. She had the charm of someone used to asking for more. My family loved stories of her talent and pretended that generosity was proof they'd done right. They spent money on her the way some people buy flowers and forget to water them.
"Kali always finds ways to make herself the center," my mother had said a hundred times. "She's had a hard life. You should be kind to her."
"Kind?" the word tasted like salt.
When Harrison came home that night he looked like he'd slept on glass. He saw my knee, the ragged bandage, the bright shame on my skin.
"What happened?" he asked.
"You left."
"I had to go," he said, hunched sideways like a man trying to fit through a small truth. "There was an emergency."
"What kind of emergency?"
"An old friend. Kali. She was having an episode. I told you—"
"You told me?" I laughed and the sound was too sharp. "You told me by running away and leaving me at my own wedding."
He sat beside me and reached for the gauze. "I'm sorry," he said, and his voice folded like paper.
"Marry me or leave me," I said, the words soft and brittle. "Either way, be honest."
"Vera, don't say 'leave me' like that. It's cruel."
"I mean it." I wrapped the last of the bandage around my knee. The room leaned in through the window like a judge.
"I have to go," Harrison said suddenly. He stood and moved like a man walking past a minefield. "I'll be back."
"Where now?" I asked, because I wanted him to tell me he was going to Kali's hospital bed or the stairwell where the story had begun.
"Company emergency," he said. "Please, don't be angry."
"Angry?" I asked. "I'm not the angry part. I'm the rest."
He kissed my forehead, and the kiss landed with less heat than a closed window. He left. I watched him go, the tail of his coat the last movement.
After he left I found out the truth that had been waiting like a hidden stitch. The doctors had given me a label I couldn't scrub off: esophageal cancer, advanced stage. The words hit my ears like coins being poured out. I was twenty-seven.
"You're joking," I told the first doctor who said it. "I'm young."
"We're sorry," a man in a white coat said, and the doctor's hands were steady because this is how the world keeps working: people in white coats say sorry often enough to make it practical.
I had kept the truth of the diagnosis from everyone for weeks. I didn't know how to say it. I thought because I had to be brave every other day, a brave lie might make the last days softer for the people who loved me.
"Harrison," I wanted to tell him. "Harrison, I have cancer. I'm going to be gone soon. We should spend what time we have."
Instead I lived the way one breathes underwater—quick, shallow, determined to not gulp.
"Surgery?" Faith asked when she finally sat down across from me in the hospital café and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.
"It's too late," I said.
"You're not saying that," she replied. "You have options. We can look at hospitals, at trials."
"I'm tired," I said. "I have been tired a long time."
"Why didn't you tell me?" she demanded, the voice that trusted me until the world had to be honest.
"Because I wanted to be the girl who had a wedding. For once. I wanted at least one day where I could be beautiful and not sick."
"I got you," she said. "We'll still get you that day. We'll throw a wedding with balloons and cake, even if you have to wear slippers."
I laughed. "You always were dramatic."
When Kali showed up at the hospital—hair unbrushed, eyes raw—she stormed like wind through a hollow room.
"Vera," she said, venom and something like need in her throat. "Why did you take him?"
"I didn't take anyone," I replied. "Harrison and I chose each other."
"You chose?" Kali sneered. "You always take what's left."
"That's not true," I said.
"Isn't it?" she spit. "You get to be the good daughter and the patient one. You get to have everything handed to you. I'm the one who hurts and still they look at me like I'm broken."
"You have help," I said, tired of the old fight. "You have people who spend money on you."
She laughed then, a sound frayed and bitter. "That money bought me food," she said. "It bought me lessons and strings of pity. But it didn't teach me how to be loved."
"Stop," I said. "You're bleeding out. We're at the hospital."
"Do you think I want your pity? Do you think I want Harrison's leftovers?" Kali's eyes were bright and dangerous. "I sent the message earlier. I told him I wouldn't disturb anymore. Maybe I'm tired too. Maybe I'm sick of being second."
"You sent the message?" I asked, incredulous and then not incredulous at all.
She shrugged like an anchor. "He used to be mine. Maybe he's still mine in small ways. Maybe you don't mind sharing."
I left the room then because everything I touched turned to arguments and glass. I went to the jewelry store on impulse and put the ring on the counter.
"This is the ring?" I asked the clerk, a young saleswoman named Nicole Barrett who closed at seven and smiled as if no one ever broke her.
"It was bought last Sunday," Nicole said. "A man flew in. He trailed sweat and apology. He said his wife deserved the world."
"Which man?" I asked.
"Sorry," she said, shaking her head. "I can't say."
"It was Harrison," I told her. "He bought it in a panic."
She blinked. "He seemed like a good man."
"Not like that," I whispered, and the weight in my chest was heavy enough to crush.
Our marriage disintegrated like an old book. I asked for a divorce. "Harrison, just sign the papers," I said. "I don't want the money. I want to be alone. I want to choose how to go."
"You can't be serious," he said. He looked smaller than he had at twenty-five when he told me he'd build a life with me. There was panic in him now, a raw hunger.
"I am serious."
"Don't," he begged.
"Then sign," I said. "If you love me, sign."
He didn't sign that day, or the next, but eventually, because the law takes its time and I could not, he signed. He muttered about lawyers and money and what half of a tired life meant. Even as we divorced I felt the thin neatness of it like a bandage.
"I thought we had time," he said once in a low voice in front of the county clerk as if time were a person they could bargain with.
"You never did," I answered. "You hid things from me with neat excuses."
I took a flight to a small house I had bought a year before, a place with a tiny courtyard and a blue jacaranda tree. Its branches waited in winter, bare and patient. It seemed like a proper place to keep a small life.
"Here," Faith said when I showed her the room. "Here you will rest. Here we'll eat terrible instant noodles and watch old movies."
"I'll try not to be terrible," I joked.
We planned nothing big. I was selfish with my days. I signed my name on the dotted line, bought a ticket to the little town and had a moment of fierce, private joy when the plane rose and the city shrank.
"You're brave," Faith said.
"I'm tired," I said. "But I am also relieved."
I tried to stitch my days into something soft. Faith cooked soups she said would fix everything. She wrote me letters and hid them in my pockets. A neighbor, Mustafa Schwarz, built a step for my courtyard so my knees wouldn't complain so much. Nicole Barrett sent a bouquet and a small box of chocolates.
The blue jacaranda became an altar of small things. I sat under it and thought of the ring, of the prayer I didn't make, of how to keep my dignity when everything soft inside me was bruised.
One night, Harrison came to the gate.
"Vera," he said. "Please."
"Don't call me like that," I said.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I sent the money."
He held a bank receipt like a Christian holds a rosary. "Seventy thousand," he said.
"I don't want the seventy thousand," I said.
"I know," he said. "I want to see you."
"You can't," I said.
"Please," he begged. "I want to say goodbye."
"Then stand on the street and say it," I said. "Say it loudly."
He sat on the cold stone and told me his version of the past. He wanted to be the man who didn't know, the man who had been pulled apart by circumstance. He broke into a thousand apologies and the same small phrases he'd used for years: "I didn't mean to" and "I was scared."
"Why didn't you come earlier when I was vomiting every night?" I asked.
"I thought you were strong," he said. "I thought—"
"Thought?" The word was small and furious. "You thought I could carry a hell that you wouldn't look at."
He looked away and the whole man shrank. I felt like someone had set a mirror down and his reflection had been swallowed.
"Let me hold your hand," he begged.
"No," I said.
He tried again and again. Each time his hope hardened into something whiter and more brittle. At last he begged at the gate with the kind of hunger reserved for people who realize they've lost the map.
He fell to his knees in the cold that night. He wasn't the man I married; he was the boy who had been left to learn on his own. Neighbors saw him. The old woman across the lane shook her head. Mustafa came out and stood on the steps, his face like an oak trunk.
"Get up," Mustafa ordered when Harrison didn't move. "You should be ashamed."
"Please," Harrison whispered. "Please."
"Why should I help you?" Mustafa said, loud enough for others to hear. "You left her at her wedding, remember? You left her in a gown. You ran."
"What are you doing?" Faith demanded, striding out of the kitchen in her cardigan, fierce and red-eyed. "Do you think begging will bring her back?"
"I want to see her," Harrison sobbed. "Just once."
"She will never be yours again," Faith said. "You sold her with your lies."
He left that night in a rain of words and old mistakes. He stayed away for a while, then came back, smaller and rougher, each time with a bank slip or a gift or a new apology. "Please let me see her," he would say. And each time Faith's voice would be the one to cut him away.
But people have a hunger for spectacle and so we must talk about what the world really wanted: the punishment.
They came the day I was to have my ashes scattered. Faith had arranged a small memorial in the courtyard under the jacaranda. The air smelled of wood smoke and boiled tea. The friends were assembled—Nicole Barrett with a pale face, Mustafa with crossed arms, Galina Rice holding a thermos, and a dozen neighbors who had loved small kindnesses from a woman who had given more than she received.
"Why are you inviting him?" my mother had asked when she learned. "Why expose family like that?"
"Because some things should be said," Faith replied to her over the phone. "Some things must be said in front of people."
When Harrison arrived he carried a bouquet and a man who looked as if he'd been carved by apology. He walked as if the ground might crack open. The crowd fell quiet when he came.
"You don't have any right," Faith said before he could speak. "You're not allowed in."
"Harrison," someone murmured like a wind. "You should stay away."
He tried to speak, and his voice was a broken thing. "I—"
"Do you remember the wedding day?" Faith asked. "Do you remember leaving her in the gown because you were afraid of a message?"
"No—I—" he started.
"You left her," a neighbor said. "You walked out on her when she was supposed to be celebrated."
"I had to go help Kali," he begged. "She sent a message. She needed me."
"She sent a message," Faith repeated. "You chose a message."
"But she—"
"She was sent," Faith said, and then she let the silence hang like a blade.
"Vera trusted you," Nicole said, stepping forward, her voice small and sharp. "She sat in a gown expecting to be loved and you left. You came back with a ring bought in panic. You called it contrition."
"It's not true," he said. "I didn't—"
"Then answer," Faith demanded. "When she was vomiting at night, when she couldn't swallow, when the doctors gave her a name you couldn't bear—what did you say to her? Did you say we'll fight it like we fought everything else? Did you stay up? Did you go with her? Did you pick up her pills and mix them with water? Or did you go to Kali?"
Harrison had no words. His mouth opened and closed like a fish. He looked panic-struck, like a man drowning in a thing he'd thought someone else would rescue him from.
"Why did you leave her at the altar?" Galina asked, startling a murmur out of the crowd.
"Because I was scared," Harrison admitted, and those two words were as loud as a confession.
"You're a coward," Mustafa said. "If she had told you she was dying, would you have run? Or would you have learned to be brave?"
"Stop," Harrison pleaded.
"No," Faith said. "No more. We are tired of excuses."
A neighbor took out her phone and displayed a message Harrison had once sent to a friend, words about 'saving face' and 'not making waves.' Another voice read out a short chat where he had joked about 'time being for others' and something else. People gasped like pebbles dropping into a still pond. The murmurs amplified into anger.
"Look at him," a woman said. "Look at how he makes his apologies performative. He sends money after the fact and thinks it buys absolution."
"It doesn't," said someone else. "It never will."
Harrison tried to step forward but a ring of people moved to block him like a living fence. He knelt and then stood and began to weep. His face contorted through disbelief, guilt, denial.
"It's my fault," he said. "I didn't know how to—"
"You knew," Faith snapped. "You hid behind your career and your clean hands. You find pity after the wreckage and think it will be enough. Do you know what it's like to choose your last days? She chose the dignity of leaving you. She chose to cut you out because she wouldn't be owned."
"I—" he stammered. "I tried—"
"Too little," Mustafa said. "Too late."
People started to shout. Some called him a coward. Someone threw his bouquet aside like a failed offering. A neighbor spat a single word that landed like a stone. He folded into himself, the center of a crowd that had found its voice. His color drained. For the first time anyone had watched him, Hankered apology turned into spectacle, a man of reputation publicly undone.
Harrison's face flickered through emotions: pride, confusion, anger, denial, collapse. He tried to speak of love, of being misled, but the words fell out like cheap coins. A woman took a picture and another posted it live. "Here," Faith said fiercely, "let the world see what a man who leaves looks like when there is nothing to buy him back."
He begged for mercy. He begged for one last glance. He begged for forgiveness. He promised to give up everything to fix it. People laughed in bitter, ugly bursts.
"You're not entitled to her funeral," someone said.
"You're not entitled to her last breath," another voice added.
He slumped to the ground in the yard as if the stones might take him in. He curled around himself, and for a long moment the courtyard listened. There were whispers about where he'd taken the money earlier and whether he had been generous or performative, about how he had fed Kali's needs and ignored his wife.
By the time he left, he was a man who had been unmade in public. The pictures would live on like witnesses. He tried to bargain—"I'll give the money to her family"—but the crowd had hardened.
"Give it to someone who'll use it to care," Faith said. "You're not welcome here."
He walked away and left a trail of small, broken promises like confetti. That scene was long and precise and sharp. It made something clear: he would never have his cheap redemption. He had been denuded by witness. That was his punishment.
Later, news spread. Online message threads shredded his name. His company had people who could spin, but spin cannot heal a grave absence. When he later went to the bank to wire money—blinded by guilt—the room sang with indifferent clerks and a voice over the counter. He became shaky and retched in front of strangers. His knees buckled and he fell into a chair, his face wet with tears and snot, and a middle-aged man tapped his shoulder and called out, "That's the man who left her at the altar!"
They filmed him and posted it. The clip had a sound like nails on a chalkboard. It would travel: a man begging in the rain, a man unsteady with shame, a man with nothing to offer but regret.
Kali's punishment was quieter but no less real. After the truth of how she'd begged and how she'd clawed for attention came out—how she had sent the message that had split the day—people turned toward her with coldness. She had been Sarajevo in small town; the anger landed like rain. Her schoolmates stopped calling. The musicians who had once encouraged her suddenly had less time. Her aunt, who had once cosseted her, kept her at a distance. The pity evaporated and revealed the cost of habitual demand.
My mother had her own reckoning. After people learned how she had shepherded resources toward Kali and turned a kind eye away from me, neighbors stopped dropping casseroles at her door. The phone calls slowed. She still pleaded to be the mother who bought sweets and painted pity like a color, but people listened less. At the memorial, a cousin confronted her in front of everyone and said bluntly, "You loved Kali into pride and Vera into silence. Which did you think would be right?" She could only bend and offer a smaller voice. The shame is its own slow punishment.
When I finally lay down under the blue jacaranda and breathed heavy and low, I felt both the wound and the air around it. "Is it cold?" Faith asked, so ordinary and human.
"A little," I said. "But the wind feels clean."
"Do you regret anything?" she asked, trying to make room for the truth.
"I regret not telling you sooner," I said. "But I don't regret making the choice to leave my life in my hands."
"Good," she said.
Some nights, Harrison would come to the gate and sit on the step and watch the house as if he hoped a life would appear to justify him. He gave the guardianship of my things to Faith. He tried one more time, half-sober, to bargain. "Let me help with the rent," he said once.
"No," Faith replied.
"You were cruel," he whispered one-half night to the air. "I should have stayed."
"You should have," Faith answered.
I had been a woman who wanted at least one day of being beautiful and feeling safe. I had wanted it without used-up promises. I had wanted to be treated like the person I thought I could be to someone. He failed.
"I forgive you if it helps," I said once, small as a coin, and he cried like a child who had been told he had to pay for a broken thing.
The last morning, the sky was thin and bright. Faith whispered and poured the ashes into the wind. "Be free," she said. "Be free. Be free."
"Free," I thought as the dust of me scattered across the courtyard, across the blue jacaranda dirt, across the small house that had given me one more day.
"He wanted to sign the papers," Faith told me later, in one of her many letters she tucked into my pockets while I slept. "He sends money, of course. It's small consolation."
"He had his performance," I thought.
"He has his answer now. He is not absolved," she had written. "The world does not forget how easy he made his leaving."
I closed my eyes on the warm wood and the small smell of lemon curd Faith insisted on bringing. The last thing I wanted was spectacle. The last thing I wanted was a fight. The last thing I wanted was to be owned.
"Tell them I went to see the blue jacaranda when it bloomed," I whispered into the air.
"She laughed," Faith wrote. "She said she'd have me eat all the petals."
The petals never came. The tree waited for May and June and color. I waited there for something tender.
"Goodbye," I said, finally, to the man who could no longer buy back anything.
"Goodbye," he answered into the cold and the wind, from the street and then from the bank and from the long, slow days where people watched his face change.
He had his punishment. It had been public and exact. It was not grand—one does not repair a life with spectacle—but it was real. People had seen. People had judged. People had decided the story and he lived inside it.
I let the wind take me.
The End
— Thank you for reading —