After I Learned My Groom Only Loved My Heart

The Bushwick sublet has one window and a radiator that clanks like it's angry at me personally. I sit on the floor because there's no table yet, and I write the letter on the back of a takeout menu because it's the only paper I can find.

One line. That's all it needs.

*You can have it back. I never wanted to be a place someone kept her.*

I don't cry writing it. I thought I would. I fold the menu into an envelope instead, seal it, and write his name on the front in the same handwriting I used to sign five years of birthday cards.

Averie comes at seven, still in scrubs, hair falling out of its clip. She looks at the envelope like it might bite her.

"You don't have to do it this way," she says.

"I know."

"Then why—"

"Because if I tell him first, he'll talk me out of it. He's good at that." I press the envelope into her hand. "Only after he's seen. Not before. You understand me? Not one minute before."

She holds it like it's already heavier than paper. "And the box?"

"White. Ribbon, not bow. Packed on ice, the way you'd ship anything that has to stay alive a little longer than it should." I say it steady, the way I'd describe binding a spine, gluing a torn page. Technical. Clean. "Courier to The Plaza. Timed for the ceremony. Not before, not after. During."

Averie's jaw works. "Brynn, that is — that's a message. You understand that's a message, not a medical instruction."

"Good," I say. "I want it read."

She doesn't argue anymore. She just nods, once, like something in her has finally stopped fighting the current, and slides the envelope into her bag next to a folder of consent forms I already signed in a hand that didn't shake nearly as much as I expected.

---

The flowers show up two days later — at my father's address, not mine, because Callen doesn't actually know where I live now, and he didn't ask. White peonies, the kind I used to love before I knew loving them was scripted. No card. Just an assumption, wrapped in cellophane, dying slowly on my father's doorstep.

Yosef calls that night. His voice is the same flat, careful thing it's always been, like he's reading off a teleprompter even when there isn't one.

"He thinks you're cooling off," he says. "His words. 'She always comes back.'"

I laugh, and it comes out wrong, more air than sound. "Does he."

"He's not calling you. He's not looking for you. I wanted you to hear that from me before you heard it from somewhere worse."

"Thank you, Yosef." I mean it. It's the closest thing to kindness anyone in that building has offered me in a week.

There's a pause, longer than his pauses usually run. "For what it's worth," he says, "the table he drove to a landfill for — that wasn't about the table."

I don't answer that. I don't know what to do with it yet. I hang up before he can say anything else that might have mattered a year ago.

---

Skye's Instagram post goes up that same night. My silk robe, the pale gray one I bought at a shop in the Village because the woman behind the counter said it looked like moonlight on water. Skye's wearing it open at the collar, the Romero diamond turned just so toward the camera, my ring catching light that used to catch on my hand.

*Home again* ❤️, the caption says. Forty thousand likes by morning.

I stare at it longer than I should, waiting to feel something specific — rage, grief, anything with a name. What I feel instead is smaller and colder than that. Recognition. Like watching someone finally take off a mask I already knew was there.

A cousin of mine who still follows the family accounts sends me a screenshot from the Romero dinner two nights later — Diane at the head of the table, champagne flute raised, Skye seated exactly where I used to sit, laughing at something Callen said. The caption under the photo, posted by one of Diane's society friends, reads: *So good to have her back where she belongs.*

Where she belongs. Not where I belonged. There's a difference, and everyone at that table has always known it.

I hear, secondhand, that Skye's already talking florists. A different palette. A different menu. A different bride wearing my dress on my wedding day, three days from now, in a room full of people who will clap for her like they never clapped for me.

I set my phone face-down on the floor of the sublet and look at the one window, the radiator ticking its slow, ugly rhythm, and I think about the box Averie is packing ice into somewhere across the river.

Let her have the seat. Let her have the ring, the robe, the florist.

She can't have what's already scheduled to arrive at nine sharp on Saturday morning, in a white box, tied with ribbon, cold enough to keep.