Chapter 1 - Two WordsI stood in the lobby restroom of The Bellhaven Grand with my hair still dripping onto the black cocktail dress, watching my thumb hover over a contact saved simply as "R."
Three years. Three years of separate flights, separate hotel rooms whenever we visited the same city on the same week, a wedding ring I wore on a chain under my shirt instead of my finger at every single family dinner. Three years of my mother asking, at every holiday, whether I'd "given up entirely" on love, and me saying nothing, swallowing it, because the truth was more complicated than any of them deserved to have handed to them for free.
I typed two words. Come now.
Then I set the phone down on the marble counter, gripped both sides of the sink, and looked at the woman in the mirror until she stopped shaking.
Rhys Calloway had proposed to me in a parking garage in Chicago, eleven months into a relationship neither of us had planned on, both of us laughing too hard to make it sound romantic when we told the story later, except we'd never told anyone the story later, because by the time he proposed, I already understood exactly what my family would do with the information.
Not celebrate it. Weaponize it. Use it as one more stage on which to perform whatever version of me made everyone else look better by comparison — the sister who "finally got lucky," the daughter who "must have paid him," the woman my father would introduce at parties as though her happiness were a magic trick he'd personally engineered.
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So we kept it quiet. We married in a small courthouse ceremony eighteen months ago, two witnesses, a bouquet from a gas station, and I went home to my family's dinners and let them keep believing I was still alone, because the alternative felt, at the time, like handing them a knife.
I hadn't expected to need him quite like this. I hadn't expected my own father to shove me into a fountain in front of four hundred people and then stand there smiling, waiting for applause, and getting it.
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