IF ONLY YOU HAD LISTEN

Chapter 2: The Wedding Called Off

Isabella’s POV

The dress was too tight around my ribs, or maybe it was just me. My breath came shorter than it should have, my heart racing for reasons that had nothing to do with the seam-stress currently pinning fabric at my waist.

"Hold still, Miss Hart," she mumbled through a mouthful of pins, and I forced myself to stop fidgeting.

Across the room, my mother held up two swatches of white against the light streaming through the window, tilting her head like the fate of the universe depended on which one she chose.

"Ivory or pure white?" she asked, not looking up.

"Whichever you like, Mom." I'd told her that a dozen times already. She always asked anyway.

My phone buzzed against the vanity table, and I reached for it out of habit, expecting another message from the florist or Adrian's assistant confirming seating arrangements.

Instead, an unknown number.

No name, no context. Just an image, already loaded.

I frowned at the screen, my thumb hovering, but curiosity got the best of me. Which made me open it anyway.

The surrounding room tilted.

Adrian. Half-dressed, sprawled across a hotel bed I didn't recognize, and beside him, a woman. Her face was turned away, hidden by shadow and the angle of the shot, but I could see the curve of her shoulder pressed against his chest.

My stomach dropped somewhere past the floor.

"Isabella?" My mother's voice sounded far away. "Sweetheart, what's the matter?"

I couldn't answer her. I couldn't do anything except stare at the photograph like staring hard enough would rearrange the pixels into something that made sense.

It's not him. It's not him. It's not—

But it was. His legs, his hands. The small scar above his eyebrow from when he was twelve and fell off his bike, the one he always laughed about when I traced it with my finger before bed.

It was him.

"Isabella." The seam-stress had stopped pinning. My mother was crossing the room now, concerned, pulling her face tight. "What is it, Isabella? What happened? Talk to me dear."

I couldn't tell her. I couldn't say the words out loud.

I did the only thing my body seemed to remember how to do.

I called Vanessa.

She picked up on the second ring, her voice bright, already halfway into a joke about bridesmaid shoes, and then it died; the second she heard me breathing wrong on the other end.

“Va— Vanessa.”

My chest tightened as I stared at the picture again. I pressed a trembling hand over my mouth, trying to hold back the sob that escaped anyway.

"Izzy? What's wrong?" she asked with a voice full of concern.

"I need you to look at something." My voice cracked in a way I hated. "Can you come? Please."

She came in twenty minutes, sweeping into my room in a cloud of expensive perfume and immediate, unwavering focus, pulling me into the bathroom where my mother couldn't hear.

"Izzy," she said. “What is it you want me to see?”

I handed her my phone with a shaking hand.

She stared at the screen for a long moment, her expression unreadable, before she looked up at me with surprise and confusion.

"What," she shouted. I immediately closed her mouth with my palm. Then she whispered in a very low tone: "Is that really your man? Or is it AI?”

“I… I…”

“Okay, breathe Izzy,” she said. “Just breathe first."

"Vanessa—"

"Breathe, Izzy." She gripped my shoulders, steady, grounding, exactly the way she has always had since college, since the first week we met, when I was homesick, and she was the only person who noticed. "I don't think that's Adrian. Do you?"

"I also don't want to think it's him too." My voice broke apart completely.

"But look at everything," showed her the video again. “It is him.”

She was quiet for a moment, studying the photo again, and then she asked, gently, "Did Adrian tell you he was staying at that hotel?"

I froze. "Yes. He mentioned it last night. Why?"

She didn't answer right away, and that silence said more than anything she could have told me.

"Vanessa. Why are you asking that?" I asked.

"I just want to know if you're aware that he's at a hotel." She set the phone down on the counter like it had grown too hot to hold. "So that we'll know if this video is fake or real."

“I knew all men were the same," she said bitterly. “But I never expected it from Adrian. I guess Adrian is no different from the others that cheat.”

I picked the phone back up, forcing myself to look again, and that's when I saw something very familiar.

A bracelet. Delicate. A gold chain, a small pendant, was wrapped around the woman's wrist where her arm rested against Adrian's chest.

I'd seen that bracelet before. I knew I had.

"Vanessa, look." I turned the screen toward her. "This bracelet looks very familiar. Like I've seen it before. Have you?"

She glanced at it for exactly one second.

"No,” she said. “I haven't seen anything like this before.”

"Are you sure? It looks so—"

“No Izzy." Her tone stayed soft, patient, but something flickered behind her eyes too fast for me to catch. Then she pulled me into a hug before I could look again, and the moment slipped away, folded into the warmth of her arms and the familiar scent of her perfume.

I told myself I'd imagined it.

I spent the rest of that day waiting. Waiting for Adrian to call, to explain, to say something that would at least make me doubt the photograph.

My phone stayed silent.

No call, no message. Not even a single word.

The silence was worse than the photo itself, because silence meant guilt, and guilt meant everything I'd been terrified of since I was sixteen years old, watching my father walk out the door with his suitcase and his excuses.

I would not become my mother.

By evening, my hands weren't shaking anymore when I called the wedding planner. My voice came out flat, hollow, like it belonged to someone else entirely.

"Cancel it," I said. "Cancel all of it."

I hung up quickly to avoid questions.

I didn't expect the world to find out before Adrian did.

But less than an hour later, my phone exploded with notifications, one after another, faster than I could read them, and when I finally looked, one headline sat above all the rest, glowing on my screen like an accusation.

BILLIONAIRE ADRIAN STERLING'S WEDDING CANCELED TWO DAYS BEFORE THE WEDDING.