This Time, I Remember Every Lie He Told Me

The organ music stopped the moment I opened my eyes. I was standing at the altar. White silk clung to my skin, tight at the ribs, the way it had the first time. The scent hit me before anything else gardenias, hundreds of them, stuffed into silver vases along the aisle. I hated gardenias. I always had. I just never told anyone, because telling people things had never gotten me anywhere. My hands were shaking. Not from nerves. From memory. I knew this church. I knew the crooked stained-glass window above the doors, the one that threw a blue smear of light across the third pew every afternoon at exactly this hour. I knew the priest's name Father Colm and I knew he would clear his throat twice before he began, because he always did. He cleared his throat. Once. Twice. My stomach dropped straight through the floor. This wasn't déjà vu. This was my wedding day. Again. Beside me, close enough that I could smell his cologne cedar and something colder underneath, like frost on stone stood Callan Voss. My husband. My widower. The man who buried me three years from now with a black tie and a face that didn't know how to cry. I turned my head, just slightly, and looked at him the way I hadn't let myself look at him in that other life — not with love, not with hope, but with the flat, careful eyes of someone reading a contract for the second time, searching for the clause they missed. He was younger here. Not in years barely a year younger but in the way his jaw sat, the way his shoulders hadn't yet learned to carry the weight of hiding things. He looked at me like a man who still believed he could get away with everything. He could. He had. For three years, he had. "Do you, Wren Castellan," Father Colm said, "take this man—" I remembered the affair before it happened. I remembered the woman's name Delphine and the earrings he bought her with money skimmed from an account with my name on it. I remembered the night I found the hotel receipt tucked in his coat, how he'd looked me dead in the eye and called me paranoid. I remembered believing him, because believing him hurt less than the alternative. I remembered the car. The wet road. The way he hadn't come to the hospital until visiting hours were already over, his shirt too clean for a man who claimed he'd been at his mother's bedside all night. I remembered dying certain I had imagined all of it. I hadn't imagined a single thing. "I do," I said. My voice didn't shake. That surprised me more than waking up here at all. Callan's mouth curved not quite a smile, more like a man checking a box. He said his own vow smoothly, the words rehearsed and warm and utterly false, and three hundred guests sighed like they were watching something real. I clapped when everyone else clapped. I let him slide the ring onto my finger, cold metal against a hand that used to tremble every time he touched it. I did not tremble now. Because this time, I knew where every lie was buried, and I intended to dig each one up myself. The reception blurred past in gold light and champagne I didn't drink. I watched him work the room the way he always had a hand on this senator's shoulder, a laugh at that board member's joke, his eyes flicking to the door every few minutes like he was expecting someone. I knew who. Delphine wouldn't come tonight. Not yet. She wasn't even in the city yet, if I remembered the timeline right she'd transfer into his company's Zurich office in four months, and the affair wouldn't start for six. I had time. I had more time than I'd ever had in my life, because I was the only person alive who knew how this story ended. "You're quiet," Callan said, appearing at my elbow with two glasses of champagne. He held one out to me. "Regretting it already, Mrs. Voss?" The name landed strange in my ears. Mrs. Voss. I had worn it like a bruise for three years, never realizing it was one until it killed me. "Just tired," I said, and took the glass, and didn't drink from it. He studied me a beat too long. Something flickered behind his eyes not guilt, he didn't feel guilt yet, not this early but something close to curiosity. Like he'd noticed, for the first time, that I wasn't looking at him the way I used to. "You've changed," he said quietly, almost to himself. I smiled at him then. Really smiled, the first real one I'd given him in either life. "You have no idea," I said. Across the ballroom, a woman in a red dress I didn't recognize yet lifted her phone and snapped a photo of the two of us, the perfect couple, golden and glowing under the chandelier light. I would learn her name eventually. Everyone in this room would learn it, one way or another. Callan's phone buzzed in his jacket pocket. He didn't check it in front of me. He never did. But I saw the way his jaw tightened when he felt it vibrate a second time. I already knew who was calling.