The Bride They Tried To Erase

The Fall

Liana's POV

Freya stepped out of the car first, her heels sinking slightly into the dirt at the road's edge. She smoothed the front of her dress like she had all the time in the world. Xavier came around from the other side a moment later, standing beside her — not rushing to me, not even glancing at the cliff, at the driver, at any of it. Just standing there, like this was a scene he'd already rehearsed.

For a moment I couldn't make my mouth work. My knees had given out somewhere on the walk here, and the gravel bit into my palms where I knelt.

Then it came out of me in a rush. "Freya? Xavier?" My voice cracked in half. "What did I do to deserve this? *Why?!*"

"So you already know." Freya's mouth curved, unbothered, like I'd asked her something mildly inconvenient. She glanced sideways at Xavier. "Well. The cat's out of the cage."

She tilted her head, studying me the way you'd study something whose ending you'd already decided. Her eyes moved over the torn hem of my dress, the missing bouquet, the dirt on my knees, and something in her expression looked almost pleased by it.

"Funny," she said. "You're the one on your knees, and you're still asking *why* instead of *please*."

I stared at her. My throat had closed too tight to answer.

"Because I never loved you." She said it simply, like a fact she was tired of holding in. "Not once. Not as a friend."

The wind pulled at my veil, and I didn't move to stop it.

"High school." Her voice stayed light, almost conversational. "The day he walked in and looked straight past me to you. I saw him first, Liana. I wanted him first." Her jaw tightened, just barely, the only c***k in the performance. "Do you know what that's like? Watching you get everything without even trying — the family, the money, his attention.”

She took a step closer. Close enough that I caught her perfume — the same one she'd worn to my engagement party, the one I'd complimented, the one she'd laughed and said *you helped me pick it out, remember?*

"So I stayed close," she said. "I smiled. I let you cry on my shoulder over every stupid little thing." A small shrug, like she was setting down something heavy she'd carried a long way. "It was easier than hating you from a distance."

"Every memory," I whispered. "Every birthday. Every night we stayed up talking until the sun came up."

"Convenient," she said.

I turned to Xavier. He still hadn't said a word.

"Tell me it wasn't all a lie," I said. "Tell me *something* was real."

He looked at me the way you'd look at a stranger asking for directions — polite, distant, already thinking about something else. "Your family's connections were useful. That's all it ever was."

I waited. For a flicker. A hesitation. Anything at all.

Nothing came. Not even the effort of pretending.

"You used me," I said, and my voice didn't shake, which surprised me more than anything else that night. "My love. My trust. My family."

"I don't regret it," he said. "Not for a second."

I took a step back. The gravel shifted under my heel, small stones skittering off toward the edge behind me.

"I don't hate you for not loving me anymore." My eyes burned, but I kept them open, kept them fixed on his face, refusing to give him the tears. "I hate you because you never loved me. Not for one single day."

Freya's hand moved before I understood what it meant.

She shoved me, hard, right in the chest.

My arms flew out but there was nothing to grab onto. For a second I saw her face clearly. No hesitation. Nothing left of the girl who used to braid my hair at sleepovers— and then my heel found nothing but empty space.

"Freya—!"

The ground was gone.

The wind was roaring in my ears, ripping my veil off, my hair whipping across my face. I couldn't hear my own scream over it. My hands clawed at nothing.

The last thing I saw from the cliff's edge was the two of them, already shrinking — Xavier motionless, arms at his sides, watching me fall the way you'd watch a leaf drop from a tree. Freya beside him, smiling, her hair lifting slightly in the wind.

No guilt in her face. No hesitation.

Only satisfaction.

Her lips moved. I couldn't hear the words over the wind tearing past me, but I didn't need to. I'd read that same smile a thousand times across a lunch table, a dorm room, a hospital waiting room the year her mother died. I knew exactly what it was saying.

*Goodbye, Liana.*

The sky kept flipping, up then down then up again. The rocks and water were coming up too fast.

*Grandpa,* I thought, the word breaking apart before it finished forming. *I'm sorry. I couldn't keep my promise.*

One tear tore sideways off my cheek and vanished into the wind before it ever reached my jaw.

Darkness pressed in at the edges of everything. And then five years flashed through my eyes, fast, disjointed, all of it colliding at once.

Through every second of it, Adrian's warning kept ringing over and over in my

ears. *Don't believe everything Xavier says.*

I wished I had listened to him.