Married To The Forgotten Heir

"Aurora," the coordinator said again, holding the phone out like it burned her fingers. "I don't .... I don't know how to say this. Just watch."

Aurora's hand felt disconnected from her body as she reached for it. The screen was already playing, the volume low, but not low enough. Not low enough to stop the words from reaching her ears and landing somewhere deep in her chest like a stone dropped into water.

It was Felix. His face, familiar and terrible all at once, filled the frame. He wasn't in a tux. He was in a gray T-shirt, sitting on the edge of an unfamiliar bed, and there was a woman's shoulder visible just at the edge of the shot, bare and close to him in a way that made Aurora's stomach drop before he even opened his mouth.

"Aurora," he said, and his voice sounded almost bored, almost relieved, like a man setting down something heavy he'd been carrying too long. "I can't do this. I should have told you sooner, I know. I just ..... I couldn't. I'm not coming today. I'm sorry."

The video didn't end there this time. He shifted, glanced sideways at whoever was beside him, and kept talking, faster now, like he wanted to get it over with.

"You'll find someone," he said. "Someone who actually ..... look, you need someone who wants the same things you want. Family, all of that. I just don't think I'm that person. I never really was."

A woman's voice, muffled, said something Aurora couldn't make out. Felix huffed out something close to a laugh.

"Yeah," he said, not to Aurora anymore. "I know. I'm done."

The video cut off there, mid-motion, like whoever sent it had simply gotten what they wanted and stopped recording.

The bridal suite was silent except for the faint hum of the air conditioning and the distant murmur of two hundred guests who had no idea, yet, that the wedding they'd dressed up for did not exist anymore.

"Who sent this?" Aurora heard herself ask. Her voice came out steady, which surprised her, because nothing else in her body felt steady at all.

"It came through the venue's general line," the coordinator said. "I don't know who from. I'm so sorry, Aurora, I didn't know what else to do but bring it to you before...."

"Before the ceremony." Aurora finished the sentence for her, because the coordinator didn't seem able to. "Before I walked down an aisle toward a groom who wasn't there."

"I didn't want you to find out standing at the altar. In front of everyone." The coordinator's eyes were wet now. "I thought that would be worse."

"You were right," Aurora said quietly. "Thank you for that, at least."

Aurora set the phone down on the vanity, very carefully, the way you might set down something you were afraid would shatter if you let go too fast. She looked at her own reflection in the mirror one more time ..... veil pinned just right, curls soft around her face, a woman who had believed, twenty minutes ago, that she was about to become someone's family.

She didn't cry. She was aware, somewhere in the back of her mind, that she should be crying, that this was the kind of moment that called for tears, but her eyes stayed dry and hot instead, like something in her had simply locked a door rather than break it down. Crying would mean this was real in a way she wasn't ready to let it be real yet.

The suite door opened again. Felix's mother stood there, and this time she didn't bother pretending her smile was real. Her face had gone gray, her eyes darting anywhere but Aurora's.

"I just found out," she said. "I swear to you, Aurora, I had no idea....."

"Did you know he was seeing someone?" Aurora asked. Her voice was quiet. Almost gentle.

"No. I mean....." The older woman stopped herself, and that stopping said more than any answer would have.

"You mean yes," Aurora said. "Or you mean you suspected. Which is it?"

"I noticed things," Felix's mother admitted, so quietly Aurora almost didn't catch it. "A few weeks ago. He seemed distracted. I asked him about it once, and he said it was just wedding nerves, and I....." She pressed her lips together. "I wanted to believe him. He's my son. You understand wanting to believe in your own child."

"I don't, actually," Aurora said. "I never had one to believe."

Felix's mother flinched like she'd been slapped.

"I need you to leave," Aurora said, still gentle, still quiet, and the woman who had once hugged her tight and told her you're one of us now backed out of the room without another word, as though Aurora were something contagious.

Outside, in the hallway, Aurora could hear it start ..... the first ripple of confusion moving through the guests as word began to spread. A door somewhere. A gasp. Someone's voice, too loud, saying he did what?

She thought of the children's home. The window. The cars that pulled away without her, again and again, until she'd stopped letting herself watch for them at all.

She would not let this be one more thing that happened to her while she simply sat and watched.

Aurora stood. She smoothed the front of her dress out of habit, though there was nothing left to smooth for.

She thought of the small warning signs she had waved away over the past few weeks without letting herself really look at them ..... Felix's phone was always face-down now, when it never used to be. The late nights he blamed work. The way he'd stopped finishing his sentences sometimes, like he was choosing his words more carefully than a man should have to choose them with the woman he was about to marry.

Her hurt was curdling into something else now, something with edges. She welcomed it. Anger was easier to stand inside of than grief.

She walked to the door of the bridal suite and opened it herself, before anyone else could come in and deliver more soft, useless apologies she had no use for.

The hallway outside was chaotic in the particular, hushed way rich people did chaos ..... no shouting, just tight faces and lowered voices and eyes that slid away from her the moment she appeared. Someone's cousin was already on the phone, voice pitched low. A groomsman stood near the exit with his tie half-undone, looking anywhere but at her.

She needed air. She needed one minute where no one was watching her face to see how she'd take it.

She slipped down a side hallway meant for staff, past racks of extra chairs and folded linens, until she found a quiet stretch of corridor with a fire door propped open to the parking lot beyond. She pressed her back against the cool wall and breathed. In. Out.

Her phone buzzed in her hand.

She looked down, half expecting Felix's name, some pathetic, cowardly text trying to explain himself further. But the number on the screen was unfamiliar. No name attached. Just digits she didn't recognize.

She almost didn't answer. Some instinct, some old, careful part of her, told her not to.

She answered anyway.

"Hello?"

There was a pause, just long enough to make the hair on her arms rise. And then a voice she knew instantly, unmistakably, dripping with something bright and cruel and delighted.

"Aurora," Vanessa said, drawing the name out slowly, like she was savoring it. "I was wondering when you'd finally pick up."