Chapter 1
Cedar Falls
Chapter One: The Vows That Weren’t
The dress had cost four thousand dollars and Delia was fairly sure she was about to run a mile in it.
Not yet. Right now she was standing very still behind a hedge of white hydrangeas that the florist had assured her mother were “aspirational,” holding a glass of champagne she hadn’t touched, listening to the man she was supposed to marry in eleven minutes talk about her like she was a line item.
“—honestly, it’s not even about her,” Trent was saying, low and easy, the way he talked when he thought no one who mattered could hear him. “It’s about what the Hargrove name does for the firm. You think I’d be up for partner by thirty-two without a wife whose father sits on three boards? Come on.”
Someone laughed. Kyle, probably. Kyle laughed at everything Trent said, had been laughing at everything Trent said since they were nineteen, and Delia had spent four years finding that loyalty sort of sweet, in the dumb, forgiving way you find things sweet about people you’re trying to love your way into liking.
“She’s fine, though,” Kyle said. “Like, actually. You could do a lot worse.”
“She’s fine,” Trent agreed, in the exact tone he used to agree that a restaurant was fine, a movie was fine, a Tuesday was fine. “She’s easy. That’s the thing. Doesn’t push back on anything. I could tell her we’re moving to Ohio and she’d start packing.”
Delia stood behind the hydrangeas and did not start packing.
She had, in fact, done a great deal of not-pushing-back over the last four years. She’d moved apartments twice for his job. She’d learned to like scotch. She’d let his mother plan eleven of their date nights and hadn’t said a word when the woman scheduled the engagement party on Delia’s own mother’s birthday. She had been, by any reasonable measure, extremely easy.
She set the champagne down on the hydrangea hedge, where it would almost certainly tip over and where she found she did not care, and she walked—not ran, not yet, that would come later, barefoot, on a highway shoulder, but that was still eleven minutes and one shattered vow away—she walked around the back of the tent, past the string quartet tuning up, past her own bridesmaids doing shots out of a flask that was absolutely not supposed to be there, and out into the parking lot, where her car sat exactly where the valet had left it, keys still in her clutch because some tiny, prophetic part of her brain had refused to hand them over that morning.
She got in. She started the engine. She sat there for one full second in four thousand dollars of silk, feeling something in her chest that wasn’t quite grief and wasn’t quite rage but was doing an excellent impression of both at once, and then she put the car in drive.
She did not have a plan. This became clear around hour two, somewhere past the state line, when the adrenaline burned off and left her with a full tank turned half-empty, a phone she’d finally silenced after the fortieth call, and absolutely nowhere to be.
She’d told herself, driving, that she was going to her sister’s. Then she’d told herself she was going to a hotel, any hotel, one with a bar and room service and a bathtub big enough to sit in until this stopped feeling real. Somewhere around hour three she stopped telling herself anything at all and just drove, taking turns because they existed, watching the highway shrink down into county road, watching gas stations get farther apart and towns get smaller, until the low fuel light came on somewhere past a sign that read WELCOME TO CEDAR FALLS — POP. 2,114 and she thought, with the flat, punch-drunk clarity of someone who has been awake for nineteen hours and married to no one: well, I guess it’s here, then.
