This Time I Choose Me

Chapter 6

Chapter 6

NORA

Sophia stayed another hour after that, going through fabric swatches for the bachelorette party like nothing in the world was wrong, like she wasn't the reason my whole life had ended on a balcony floor eight years from now that hadn't happened yet.

"You have to come," she said at the door, pulling her jacket on. "It's your last night as a single woman. I already booked everything."

"I'll be there," I said.

"Promise?"

"I promise."

She hugged me tight, the same hug she always gave, warm and familiar, and I hugged her back just as warm, just as familiar, and neither of us meant a single thing by it.

The second the door closed behind her, my smile dropped off my face like it had never been there.

I remembered this night. I remembered it the way you remember a wound, not the whole shape of it, just the parts that still hurt when you press on them.

Last time, Sophia had thrown me a bachelorette party the night before my wedding, some private room at a club downtown, dim lights and loud music and too much champagne. She had promised to stay with me the whole night, promised she wouldn't leave my side, and I had believed her the way I believed everything she said back then.

She left around midnight. Told me she had a headache, told me to have fun, told me she'd see me at the courthouse tomorrow. I remembered waving her off, laughing, telling her to feel better, not thinking twice about it because why would I. She was my best friend. Best friends left early sometimes.

I didn't remember all of what came after. My mind had never let me hold the whole thing at once, only pieces, the taste of something bitter under the sweetness of my drink, a man's hand on my back that I didn't ask for, the room tilting in a way that had nothing to do with the champagne. I remembered waking up the next morning in a hotel room I didn't recognize, my dress torn at the shoulder, my body aching in ways I didn't have words for yet, my mind so foggy I couldn't tell what had happened from what I was afraid had happened.

I had cried on the bathroom floor of that hotel room until I couldn't breathe right.

And then Marcus had come.

I never asked how he knew where to find me. Not then, not in all the years after. He just showed up, sat outside the door and talked to me through it until I let him in, wrapped me in his jacket, drove me home, told my mother I'd had too much to drink and needed rest before the wedding. He never once made me feel small for it. He held my hand through the whole wedding morning and told me I was still going to be someone's wife, still going to have a good life, still going to be okay.

I remembered thinking, in the middle of all that wreckage, that I had found an angel. That whatever had happened to me that night, at least I had Marcus. At least someone had come.

Sitting in my parents' kitchen now, eight years earlier than I had any right to be, I understood something I had never let myself understand before.

Marcus always knew exactly what to say. Marcus always knew exactly where to find me. Marcus had built himself into the one steady thing in my life that whole first marriage, the friend I called first, the one I trusted before anyone else, and I had never once asked myself why a man that careful, that put together, happened to be standing outside a hotel room door at six in the morning the day before someone else's wedding.

What if he hadn't found me by accident.

What if he'd known exactly where I would be, because he was part of arranging it.

Make her scared. Make her small. Make her grateful to the one person who shows up for her. Make her dependent on him before she even says her vows to someone else.

My stomach turned over so hard I had to grip the edge of the table.

I didn't know for certain. I had no proof, nothing but a feeling and a memory that had never fully made sense even the first time I lived it. But I had learned enough in the last two days to know that feelings like this one weren't accidents. Not around these people. Not around this wedding.

If Marcus was part of it too, if the angel who caught me falling was really just another hand that pushed, then this went so much deeper than Daniel and Sophia. This had roots I hadn't even started digging toward yet.

I sat there until my hands stopped shaking, and then I stood up and found my mother in the living room, folding napkins for tomorrow with a stack of ribbon beside her.

"Mom, I need some air. I'm going to take a drive."

She looked up, surprised. "Now? Sweetheart, we still have so much to go over before the wedding, it is in a few hours. Besides you went to bed early and had your phone switched off, sophie called a lot before I told her you suddenly came ill with a small stomach ache"

"I know. I won't be long. I just need to clear my head before the wedding."

She studied me for a second, the way mothers do when they know something is off but can't name it. "Okay. Be careful. And be back in time to get ready."

"I will."

I took my father's old car from the garage, the one I used to drive before Daniel bought me something newer, something with his name basically stitched into the leather, and I pulled out of the driveway before anyone could ask me anything else.

I didn't have to think about where I was going. The address had lived somewhere in the back of my mind for years, from the one time, near the very end of my first marriage, when I'd overheard Daniel on the phone late at night, his voice low, saying a name I wasn't supposed to hear. Adrian Rayne. And a place. A quiet care home two hours outside the city, the kind of place people paid a lot of money to keep quiet.