Part 2
I should have left.
That’s what any sensible person would have done—slip out the back door, call my brother, disappear before the guests even realized what had happened. But as I stood there trembling in my wedding dress, one truth became painfully clear: if I disappeared, Ethan would control the story. He would tell everyone that I panicked, that pregnancy hormones had made me unstable, that I humiliated him for no reason. And people would believe him, because Ethan had always been good at one thing: making lies sound reasonable.
So instead of running away, I asked for Emily to come back upstairs.
The moment she saw my face, she froze.
“Claire, what happened?”
I closed the door and told her everything, word for word. By the time I finished, her expression had shifted from confusion to fury.
“Oh my God,” she whispered. “Claire, you can’t marry him.”
“I’m not going to,” I said, with a voice steadier than I felt. “But I am going downstairs.”
She looked at me for two long seconds and then nodded.
“Tell me what you need.”
That question saved me.
Ten minutes later, my father came upstairs. I expected him to explode—to storm downstairs in fury and throw Ethan through a stained-glass window. But instead, he listened in silence, his jaw clenched and his eyes filled with pain. When I finished, he took my hands carefully, as if I might break.
“Are you sure you want to do this in public?” he asked.
“No,” I answered honestly. “But I need witnesses.”
He nodded once.
“Then you won’t be there alone.”
When the coordinator knocked on the door and said it was time, the entire room seemed to shift around me. The contractions—if that’s what they were—had eased enough for me to walk. Emily held my bouquet. My father offered his arm.
And when the chapel doors opened, all the guests stood with smiles on their faces and cameras raised, ready to capture a perfect memory.
At the altar, Ethan looked exactly the way I had imagined so many times: handsome, impeccable, confident. He smiled when he saw me, as if nothing in the world were wrong.
That smile almost destroyed me.
The officiant began. We went through the opening lines, the prayer, even the first polite laughter from the audience. Ethan even squeezed my hand once, and I had to stop myself from pulling away.
Then the vows came.
The officiant turned to Ethan first.
He cleared his throat, unfolded the paper he had in his pocket, and began:
“Claire, from the moment I met you—”
“Stop.”
My voice echoed through the entire chapel.
A hundred heads turned toward me. Ethan blinked.
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