This Time I Choose Me

Chapter 5

Chapter 5

NORA

I sat on the edge of my bed for a long time after my mother's footsteps faded back down the hall. I didn't move. I just stared at my hands, turning them over, looking at skin that had no lines on it yet, no small scar on my thumb from a kitchen accident that hadn't happened yet, no faint mark on my finger where a ring used to sit.

The wedding dress hung on the back of my door, wrapped in thin plastic, white and waiting. I remembered picking it out. I remembered how happy I was that day, how sure I was that everything in front of me was good.

I got up and walked to the mirror again. My face looked back at me, twenty years old, soft in the cheeks in a way I'd forgotten, eyes clear instead of tired. I touched my own cheek like I needed to check it was real, like I needed proof my skin still worked the way skin was supposed to.

It took hours before it settled into me, really settled, not as a dream I would wake up from twice, but as something true. I had died. I had felt myself falling, felt the cold air, felt the plea leave me in that last second. And somehow I was here, in a body that hadn't been broken yet, in a life that hadn't been ruined yet.

The grief didn't go away just because I understood what had happened.

I heard my mother downstairs, humming something while she moved pots around in the kitchen, probably cooking too much food the day before my wedding the way she always did when she was nervous and happy at once. I heard my father's car pull into the driveway, home early from the office because he wanted to spend the day before the wedding with his family.

My father. I hadn't thought about him standing in that driveway in years, not as anything other than a headstone I used to visit. My chest tightened hard enough that I had to sit back down on the bed.

He was alive. Right now, downstairs, alive and healthy and about to hand me the company shares as a wedding gift, the same shares I signed half away two years into my marriage because Daniel told me it made sense for taxes. The same shares that turned out to be the only reason Daniel ever looked at me twice.

I wasn't going to hand them over so easily this time.

I made myself get up and go through the motions of the morning, because if I sat in this room too long staring at nothing, someone would notice. My mother would ask questions. I wasn't ready to explain anything to anyone, not yet, not until I understood exactly what I was dealing with.

I washed my face. I got dressed. I went downstairs and let my mother hug me and talk about flowers and seating charts and whether the caterer would show up on time, and I nodded and smiled in the right places, my mind somewhere else the whole time.

I thought about the shares. My father had built that company from nothing, spent thirty years growing it into something real, and his plan was always to fold half of it into my name once I married, a wedding gift and a safety net at once. He used to say a woman should never depend fully on her husband for money, that she should always have something of her own standing beside her. I remembered him saying that at the old dinner table, remembered not really understanding why it mattered so much to him.

I understood now.

Last time, I let Daniel talk me into signing that gift over into joint accounts, joint control, all under the excuse of taxes and simplicity. Last time, I thought that was what love looked like, sharing everything, holding nothing back. I found out eight years too late that it only ever went one direction.

Not this time. This time the shares would stay exactly where my father intended them to stay, in my name, under my control, and nobody would talk me out of that with soft words about trust.

I thought about Sophia next, and my stomach turned even thinking her name, even here, even before anything had happened yet. She was supposed to come by that afternoon to help me get ready, the same as she had the first time, fussing over my hair and my dress, crying happy tears that I now knew weren't happy at all, or maybe they were, just not for the reason I thought.

I wondered how long it had already started between them. Whether it began before the wedding or after. Whether Sophia sat beside me at every dress fitting already planning what she'd take from me. Whether she looked at my ring the first time I showed it to her and felt anything at all besides calculation.

I decided something sitting there at the kitchen table, nodding along to my mother's talk of flowers.

I wasn't going to call off the wedding.

Not yet.

If I ended it now, blew it all up the day before, Daniel would just walk away clean, take his secrets with him, keep whatever plan he had running quietly somewhere else. Sophia would walk away too, untouched, free to try the same thing on someone else down the road. And I would be left standing in the wreckage again, this time with no proof, no eight years of hotel charges, no redacted marriage record, nothing but a feeling nobody would believe.

No. I wanted to watch them believe they'd won. I wanted to stand at that courthouse tomorrow and say my vows and let them think I was exactly the same soft, trusting girl I used to be. Let Daniel think he'd secured his shares. Let Sophia think she still had her quiet secret tucked safely behind my back.

While they celebrated, I would work.

I would find out exactly how deep this went, who else might be involved, whether this had truly started with Sophia or whether there was someone else, some other name that would surface the way that redacted line surfaced at the bureau. I would protect the shares before Daniel ever got the chance to touch them. I would build my own proof this time, real proof, gathered quietly, before he ever suspected I knew anything at all.

The front door opened around three, and I heard Sophia's voice call out through the house, bright and warm, exactly the voice I used to love hearing.

"Nora? I'm here, where's my bride?"

I stood up from the table and smoothed down my dress and walked toward the sound of her voice, and for the first time in either life, I felt myself smile without an ounce of kindness behind it.

"In here," I called back, my voice light, easy, perfectly familiar. "I've been waiting for you."