REJECTED BRIDE

CHAPTER 2

Chapter 2

I never write back to Marcus.

I tell myself it's because I'm tired. That's true, but it's not the reason. The reason is simpler. I don't believe it's him.

Think about it. Three years of silence from a man whose proposal I turned down. Three years of watching from a distance while he turned his good eye into a fashion house, the kind with a name on runways I used to walk. And now, the exact week his brand is all over the industry press, a message shows up out of nowhere with my name in it?

Please. That's not a message. That's a hook with a worm on it.

Isabelle could have sent it. Céline could have sent it. Either one of them would know exactly how to dig up an old wound and watch me flinch. So I do the smart thing. I leave it unanswered.

It sits in my inbox anyway, glowing at me like a hot pan I'm not allowed to touch.

• • •

Nine days later, they discharge me into an apartment that doesn't fit me anymore.

The building has no ramp. Adrien fixes that within the week. He's very good at that sort of thing. Anything money can solve, he solves quickly and generously, and then he looks so pleased that I feel rude for noticing what's left.

What's left is everything else. The bathroom mirror, mounted for a woman who stands. The kitchen shelves, now a foot too high. And the framed print of my first magazine cover, hanging right across from the bed. Milan. Twenty-three. Me, laughing mid-stride down a runway like the floor belonged to me.

I ask Odile, my aide, to take it down.

Three days later, I ask her to put it back up.

I don't think too hard about that.

Physical therapy takes my mornings. An hour of exercises that leave me wrecked and weirdly proud, because I moved a toe. One toe. A finger's width. A month ago I walked in Paris, and now I'm throwing a party over a toe.

The afternoons are mine. They're very, very long.

It's during one of those afternoons that the algorithm hands me something I never went looking for.

Rousseau Family Foundation Gala: Full Coverage. Three days old.

I know that event. I was supposed to be at it, before the truck. I click before I've decided to.

The first photo is Adrien in a black tie. I picked that tie for a different night. He's standing next to a woman I've never met and recognize instantly, the way you recognize a storm from the color of the sky. The caption does the rest: Adrien Rousseau with Céline Delacroix.

Eleven photos. In four of them, Isabelle stands between the two of them, glowing like a woman admiring a painting she ordered and finally got delivered.

In none of them is there a wheelchair. Or a cane. Or any sign that Adrien Rousseau has an actual fiancée.

I set the phone face-down and stare at the ceiling.

I think about calling him. I think about asking, very calmly, whether "I need time to handle this carefully" meant three days. Three days that apparently included posing with another woman while I iced the cut down my spine.

I don't call.

Instead, I do something else.

I should explain. A week ago, an old editor of mine sent me an email. She was the only person who didn't send sympathy. She sent a name. Élise, who runs a small agency for disabled models and creative consultants. A whole corner of my industry I never knew existed, because I never needed it.

I started a reply that night. I never finished it.

Now I open it, and I write the rest. And I hit send before I can talk myself out of it.

Her answer comes within the hour. A call, next Tuesday.

That's all. A phone call. It doesn't change one fact about my life.

And yet I realize I've been holding my breath since I hit send. For the first time in nine days, I've done something that has nothing to do with Adrien, his mother, or the life they've decided for me.

• • •

That evening, Odile helps me into the wheelchair for my first real outing. Nothing dramatic. The pharmacy, two blocks down.

The sun feels strange after so many days of hospital light. I keep my head down, which is new. A week ago I didn't have that habit, and I already hate it. It's the feeling of people's eyes sliding to the chair before they get to my face.

I spent four years being looked at for a living. I have never once felt this exposed.

On the way home, three streets from my building, I see Adrien's car.

It's parked outside a restaurant we ate at together, once, a lifetime and eleven days ago. I almost keep rolling. Then I remember the gala photos.

"Could we stop a moment?" I ask Odile.

She doesn't ask why. She just wheels me to the curb and waits. I'm learning she does that a lot. It's one of the reasons I like her.

Through the window, half hidden behind gauzy curtains, I can see a private table near the back.

Adrien. And next to him, Céline Delacroix, her hand resting on his forearm like she owns the arm, laughing at something he said.

I don't go in.

I tell myself it isn't cowardice. It's strategy. I'm not ready, physically or otherwise, for an entrance I can't control. And I know entrances. That's the one thing I actually know.

So I sit there instead. I watch a waiter refill her glass. I watch Adrien laugh, really laugh, the way he hasn't once in nine days of bedside visits. I keep watching until Odile touches my shoulder.

"Madame," she says softly. "We should go home."

I let her wheel me away.

I don't cry this time. The hospital used that up. What's left is colder. More useful.

My old instructor used to say something before a hard shoot. You don't fight the lighting. You find the angle that uses it.

I don't know my angle yet. But watching Céline's hand on Adrien's arm through that window, I know one thing for sure. I am done waiting in an apartment for someone else to decide what I'm worth.

• • •

Back home, I open my laptop for the first time since the accident. My fingers are still shaking a little when I type three words.

Disabled models portfolio.

The results are thinner than I expected, but they're not empty. A handful of campaigns. A magazine feature from two years ago that I'd never seen, about visibility and representation. A month ago it would have meant nothing to me. Now it feels like someone wrote it just for me.

I bookmark four pages. I don't know if any of it is for me. But for the first time since the crosswalk, I feel it, that pull. The pull of wanting something that belongs entirely to me. Not something Adrien gave me. Not something his mother can take away.

My phone buzzes. Adrien, checking in, punctual as a man paying off a debt.

How was your day?

I look at it for a long time. Then, for the first time in five years of answering him honestly, I type something that isn't quite a lie and isn't quite the truth.

Fine. Tired. Going to sleep early.

I don't mention the restaurant. I don't mention Élise, or the bookmarked pages, or the eleven gala photos still sitting in my camera roll.

Some things, I'm learning, you don't hand over until you're ready for them to be used against you.

I'm about to set the phone down when a second message comes in, right behind the first.

I saw you outside the restaurant tonight. Why didn't you come in?

My blood goes cold.

That's not Adrien's number.