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I snort. “You’re laying it on a little thick,babe.”
“Well, Melody and I are BFFs. It’s only right?—”
“Knox,” she interrupts. “If I have a maid of honor, it’s going to be Lucy. We’ve talked about this.”
I groan and smack my forehead. “He’s brought up being a maid of honor before?”
She cracks a smile. “Once or twice.”
“I didn’t even have a maid of honor,” I say under my breath. “My mom doesn’t count. I mean, she does count, but… she was there as my mom.”
And suddenly, that’s it.
That’s the line I can’t cross.
It isn’t that I’m married to him. I accepted that a long time ago. And it isn’t that he won’t fucking sign the divorce papers.
It’s that my first marriage turned out to be a sham, and my mother is gone, and she’ll never get to see me walk down an actual aisle toward someone who really loves me.
Instead, she saw me and Knox at a courthouse, a storm raging outside—like even the weather disagreed with our decision—wearing a white dress that was guaranteed to go see-through as soon as we stepped outside.
She stood with his mom and they were our only witnesses, and she died two and a half years later.
I don’t think about her much.
Okay, no. That’s a total fucking lie.
I think about her like she’s still alive. I think about what she might be doing—at home with Dad, for instance, or out to lunch with her friends—and then I think about the things she might say to me. About my career, my cross-country move.
What would she have thought of Joel?
And how would she react to Knox’s behavior?
It doesn’t even fucking matter, because she’s ashes in an urn on my father’s mantel.
Because where else do you put her? Not in the ground. Not when she was secretly afraid of the dark, and didn’t like bugs, and was more of a city person than me or Dad. Concrete and skyscrapers over endless fields of grass any day. So putting her in the ground,alone, seemed so wrong.
There’s a ringing in my ears, but his voice breaks through it.
“Aurora?”
I yank my hand out of Knox’s grip and bolt.
25
KNOX
“What did you do?” Jacob questions, watching Aurora flee.
Melody just seems sad, so I focus on her. Because Jacob is a guy, and he knows Melody but he’s kind of shit at reading other women. But Mel is a girl’s girl, and she’ll give it to me straight. Maybe. Hopefully.
“Her book was dedicated to her mom,” she eventually says, her gaze on me. Not too mean, just honest.
“Yeah, her mom’s pretty cool.” I lift my shoulder. “I mean, I haven’t seen any of them in a while. When I go home, the timing always seems to be off.”
“Knox…” Melody shakes her head. “Aurora’s mom died.”
My brain turns off.
