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“What happens after the wedding?”
“I leave.”
“You’ll listen when I give you something worth listening to.”
“Yes.”
“How will I know when I have it?”
“You won’t.”
Fear rises into my throat. “Then how am I supposed to come to you?”
“When you’re ready to tell the truth and can accept what I do with it.”
He moves toward the stairs.
I don’t follow.
Ryan stops beside me, but he doesn’t touch me. “You asked what’s broken. I told you.”
My voice barely survives the pressure inside my chest. “You think I don’t know how to love.”
“I think you know how to feel love more deeply than almost anyone I’ve ever met. You don’t always know how to remain loyal to it when protecting it requires you to surrender control.”
“That sounds worse.”
“It’s honest.”
He walks away.
I remain inside the corridor while his footsteps climb the stairs and disappear beneath the voices of the men waiting above. Every instinct inside me screams to follow him, find Bliss and Aura, tell them everything, and ask them to help me understand how to fix it.
Bliss is getting married today.
She is somewhere upstairs having her final breakfast as a Bennett with her father and brothers. In a few hours, she will put on the dress we designed together, carry Cindy’s memory down the aisle, and marry the man she fought through hell to reach.
I take one step toward the bridal suite before realizing what I am about to do.
I am going to walk into Bliss’s wedding morning with swollen eyes and a shattered heart. She will see me, abandon whatever joy she is allowed to feel, and begin carrying my pain because loving me has taught her that she needs to.
Aura will become furious with Ryan. My mother will panic. The entire room will reorganize itself around making sure I survive another difficult feeling.
The timing is wrong, but I was prepared to hand them the damage anyway because I didn’t want to hold it alone.
“Fuck,” I whisper as the truth settles inside me. “I am selfish.”
The word hurts, but it doesn’t destroy me.
I don’t need to punish myself for seeing it. I need to choose differently now that I do.
Treatment taught me that pain isn’t an emergency. I can be heartbroken without making everyone stop living until I feel better. I can enter that room, love Bliss through one of the most important days of her life, and return to my own devastation when it belongs.
That isn’t pretending I’m fine.
It’s refusing to make today about me.
I enter the bathroom beside the bridal suite, wash the tears from my face, and repair enough of my makeup that Bliss won’t immediately know I spent the morning being dismantled by the most honest person I have ever loved.
