The Wedding That Never Happened Because He Loved Someone Else

Lorenzo heard the flatness in my voice, and it displeased him the way a creased lapel displeased him. He glanced at the case of betrothal stones gleaming under the jeweler's lamps, then back at me, his patience already thinning.

"If it doesn't please you, we don't take it," he said. "Bianca can have something cut for you later. Something worthy."

I shook my head and refused.

"No. This one is fine."

Bianca, however, arranged her face into something soft and stricken, her eyes filling on cue. One hand drifted up and turned the heavy emerald on her finger inward, pressing the stone flat against her palm as though shielding it from a room that might recognize it.

"Adriana, I'll go to the workshop myself, tonight. I'll see to the design with my own hands. You'll have a perfect joining of bloodlines, I swear it."

And with that she was gone, heels striking the marble like small shots, weaving past the silent man who held the door for the Falcone name. No matter how Lorenzo called after her, she did not slow.

"Adriana, what is the matter with you? It's a stone. Why do you make such a spectacle of it?"

I looked at him, genuinely taken aback.

"What spectacle am I making?"

He pressed his lips into a tight line and drew me out of the shop by the elbow, past the glass cases, out into the cold air that smelled of rain and exhaust and other people's money.

"I have business to see to. We'll sit for the wedding portraits another time." A pause, then the offer slid out smooth as oil. "Or you sit for yours alone first. I'll have the men paint my suit over them later, for the union pictures."

"All right."

His explanations caught somewhere in his throat. He looked at me for a long moment, weighing something, then folded me into his arms with a gentleness that no longer reached me.

"Adriana. When the work is done, I'll take you away. A trip, just us, and we'll have the bridal portraits done somewhere with a view."

To me, that careless promise of a honeymoon landed like a blow dressed as a kiss. He had no time to cross into Lunaria's territory to see me, no time at all. Yet he had found time to take Bianca north to watch the lights burn green over the ice, time to stand beside her where the cold sea broke against black rock. I had seen the photographs. I had seen the way he stood.

When I watched the little pin of his location drift across the city, hurrying toward Bianca's workshop, I walked back into the shop and set the betrothal stone in the sales associate's palm myself.

As I expected, Lorenzo did not come home for two days. He was at the shore with Bianca, sitting for their wedding portraits against the water. And, just as he'd said, he had someone paint our faces over theirs after, the way a man launders a thing until no one can prove whose it was to begin with.

He was set on his absence now. He would surface, I thought, only for the tribute owed to my dead.

So I went to them myself, two bouquets cradled against my coat. The family resting place sat quiet under a grey sky, the gravel paths swept, the old stones leaning like men who had grown tired of standing. I found the caretaker and added him to my phone so the matter would stay in my hands and no one else's.

"I'll see to the tribute for my mother and father from now on," I told him. "Whatever the Falcone name offers toward it, refuse it."

The caretaker checked his ledger and his face changed.

"Miss. The tribute on your parents' graves has gone unpaid these six months. We tried the family. The number was dead."

I had changed that number when I crossed into Lunaria. The fault was mine, and the realization sat in my chest like a swallowed stone. But beneath it ran a colder current. Lorenzo no longer cared whether I lived or died. How would such a man remember to honor my dead? To neglect the resting place of one's family is a dishonor that does not wash out. He had let it lapse without a flicker of shame.

I paid what was owed, then paid ten years forward so no man's forgetting could ever touch them again, and walked out heavy and hollowed.

I had almost reached the gate when I heard a voice I will carry to my own grave.

"Lorenzo, you remember it's the old man's memorial today, eh? Bianca's true father. If he knew you'd come to keep him company for a drink, he'd be clawing his way up out of the dirt to thank you!"

I turned, stiff as wood, and saw Lorenzo climbing the steps with Bianca on one side and her mother on the other, the three of them an easy little procession, at home among my family's dead.

"Signora," Lorenzo said, "it's only right. It's what a man should do."

"Don't be a stranger about it. In a few days you'll be calling me Mamma."

Lorenzo laughed, full and warm, and called her Mamma without a breath of hesitation, the word as natural in his mouth as a blade in his hand.

My eyes burned. I said nothing. I turned away from them and went quietly to meet my associates instead. I came to it plainly, with no soft edges left to spare: the union was off. There would be no wedding.

They traded a glance between them, then asked me, careful as men stepping over a tripwire.

"Adriana. You already know?"

I didn't understand how they could know anything. Then, hot with their own anger on my behalf, they put it in front of me: photographs of Lorenzo and Bianca at the doctor's, sitting close, the picture of a couple seeing to a couple's matters before a joining.

"Adriana, we're with you. Walk away from this farce. I'd give anything to see a wedding with no bride at the center of it. Let Bianca show up to take a ceremony that was never hers. Let the whole community watch and laugh."

There was something in that I almost looked forward to.

The night before the ceremony, Lorenzo came home carrying a brand-new pair of running shoes, the box still creased and white. I asked him, calm as still water, "You always hated running shoes."

He paused. Then he laughed, half a beat too soon, and his fingers went to the knot of his tie and worked it as if to straighten it, though it had been straight all along. He patted the top of my head.

"Tomorrow I'll need to move fast. With the bride on my back."

The bride he meant was not me. The smile that broke across his face was not for me either. It seemed making me the centerpiece of a public theft, the shamed figure at a Family gathering so he could prove his devotion to Bianca before everyone, had put him in fine spirits.

The next day I walked the venue alone before anyone arrived. Enormous portraits stood along the entrance, and the magnification had betrayed every seam of the editing, every place where my face had been laid over another woman's life like a mask that didn't quite fit.

I took out a pair of scissors. I cut my young, bright face out of every one of them, clean. Then I pressed my thumb to the bare band of skin where a stone should have sat, smoothed it once, and folded my hands. I called a car and went to the airport.

When the attendant leaned in to remind me to turn off my phone, Lorenzo's calls had already begun to flood the screen, one after another after another, lighting up in the dark.