The Wedding Clearing
Pandora
My wedding dress looks like something made for a girl who’s never been betrayed.
Ivory satin spills around my feet in careful, expensive waves, soft enough that every step whispers against the wooden floor of the bridal cottage. Pearls climb the bodice in delicate vines. Lace cuffs my wrists like something holy. The veil is pinned so carefully into my hair that one wrong breath feels like it might disturb the entire illusion.
I look beautiful.
That should matter more.
I stare at myself in the antique mirror while my heart beats too fast beneath all that lace, and I try to find the version of myself who woke up this morning smiling. She was here a few hours ago. She sat at the vanity while Livia curled my hair and told me I looked like a tragic princess in the best possible way. She laughed when my mother cried over the dress. She held Everett’s ring box in both hands and felt certain, so painfully certain, that loving the same boy since high school had been worth every hard year it took to get here.
Now the cottage feels too quiet.
Outside, the forest’s full of wedding music and murmuring guests. I can hear the string quartet playing softly from the clearing, the notes floating through the open window with the smell of pine, damp earth, and white roses. Everyone’s waiting beneath the arch Everett built with his own hands. Everyone’s seated on those neat rows of wooden chairs with ribbon tied to the backs. Everyone’s expecting me to walk down the aisle and become Mrs. Pandora Bryant.
My stomach twists.
I press one hand against it and breathe through my nose the way Livia told me to when I started shaking earlier.
Except Livia isn’t here.
Everett isn’t either.
My mother steps behind me in the mirror, her soft brown eyes shining like she’s trying not to cry again. “Baby, you look pale.”
“I’m fine,” I say, because brides are supposed to say that. Brides are supposed to glow. Brides are supposed to float through the day like nothing ugly can touch them. “I think I just need a minute.”
“You’ve had a lot of minutes.” She tries to smile, but worry pulls at her mouth. “The coordinator came by twice. They’re ready whenever you are.”
Whenever I’m.
As if I’m the one making everyone wait.
I glance at the clock on the wall, the little gold hands ticking closer and closer to the moment my life’s supposed to become permanent. “Did anyone find Everett?”
“He’s probably with the groomsmen. You know how men are. They need six people to pin one flower to a jacket.” Mom reaches for my veil and fixes a piece that doesn’t need fixing. “And Livia’s likely handling something. She’s been running around all day making sure everything’s perfect.”
Livia’s been running around all day, yes. In and out of rooms. Whispering to vendors. Vanishing whenever I need her and reappearing with cheeks flushed and eyes too bright.
I don’t say that.
I don’t say that when I asked where she was ten minutes ago, one of the bridesmaids looked away before answering.
I don’t say that Everett hasn’t answered my texts.
I don’t say that the last message I got from him was nearly an hour ago, and all it said was, Don’t be nervous. I love you.
I stare down at my engagement ring, the diamond catching the cottage light in a sharp white flash. Everett gave it to me under the bleachers after our five-year reunion, laughing because he’d planned a romantic speech and forgotten every word the second he saw me. He was nervous. Sweet. Mine.
Eight years.
Eight years of football games and cheap diners, college visits and long-distance calls, apartment hunting, late bills, fights over nothing, apologies whispered into my hair. Eight years of people telling us we were too young to know forever and Everett squeezing my hand under the table like we shared a secret no one else could understand.
We made it, I told myself this morning.
So why does it feel like something’s standing behind the day with its mouth open?
A knock comes at the door before I can answer my mother, and one of the bridesmaids, Cora, peeks in. Her smile’s too wide. “Pandora? They’re asking for five minutes.”
My mother beams through her concern. “Five minutes. Oh, sweetheart.”
Cora’s gaze drops to my hands. “You okay?”
I curl my fingers around the bouquet on the vanity. White roses, baby’s breath, and little dark red berries Livia insisted would make the pictures “less basic.” She’d laughed when she said it and tucked one behind her ear.
There’s a dark red berry crushed against the vanity now. I don’t know when it fell. It leaves a stain like blood on the pale wood.
“I need to find Livia,” I say.
Cora blinks. “Right now?”
“She has my vows.”
That’s a lie. My vows are folded in the hidden pocket sewn into my dress.
My mother frowns. “Pandora, honey, someone can get her.”
“No.” The word comes out sharper than I mean it to. I soften my voice before my mother can flinch. “No, I just… I need to talk to her. It’ll take one minute.”
“Your dress,” Mom says, already reaching for the skirt.
“I can walk.” I gather the satin in both hands and force a smile. “I promise I won’t run through mud.”
The strange thing is, everyone laughs a little.
I don’t.
The cottage door opens to a rush of cool forest air. It lifts my veil and kisses the back of my neck with fingers cold enough to make me shiver. The wedding clearing sits beyond the path, glowing with lanterns strung between the trees. Guests turn their heads when they see a flash of white, but the coordinator quickly steps in front of the path and blocks the view, whispering something frantic into her headset.
I slip around the side of the cottage before anyone can stop me.
My heels sink into the soft ground. The music grows louder for a moment, then softer as I move away from the clearing and toward the smaller cabin where the groomsmen got ready. The trees crowd closer here, old pines and bare-limbed oaks wrapped in fairy lights that look pretty in the daylight and haunted beneath the clouds. Wind moves through them with a low, restless sound.
“Livia?” I call, trying to keep my voice normal.
No answer.
I keep walking.
A raven sits on a branch above the path.
I notice it because it doesn’t fly away when I pass. It only turns its head, black eye fixed on me with such still, human attention that my skin prickles beneath the lace sleeves.
“Great,” I mutter. “Even the birds are judging me.”
The raven blinks.
I tell myself not to be ridiculous and turn toward the groom’s cabin.
Then I hear her laugh.
It’s soft, breathless, and familiar enough to stop me dead.
Livia Marrow has been my best friend since ninth grade, when she sat beside me in English and told a senior boy to stop snapping my bra strap unless he wanted to lose a finger. She has a laugh people notice. Bright at the edges, smoky underneath, like she knows a joke before anyone else does. I’ve heard that laugh at sleepovers, in hospital waiting rooms, over cheap wine, through phone calls when I thought my heart was breaking.
I’ve never heard it like this.
My bouquet lowers in my hands.
The sound comes from behind the groom’s cabin, where the trees are thick enough to hide the little service path leading toward the parking lot. I move before I can think myself out of it. One step. Then another. My pulse begins to pound in my ears, each beat louder than the music from the clearing.
Everett says something too low for me to catch.
Livia laughs again.
I reach the corner of the cabin and stop.
For one merciful second, my mind refuses to understand what my eyes are seeing. It turns the scene into shapes and colors instead. Everett’s black suit jacket hanging open. Livia’s lavender bridesmaid dress pulled crooked off one shoulder. His hand against the wooden wall beside her head. Her fingers twisted in his white shirt. His mouth too close to hers.
Then Everett kisses her.
Not a mistake. Not an accident. Not the kind of kiss someone stumbles into and regrets before it ends.
He kisses her like he knows her.
The bouquet slips from my hand and hits the dirt.
Everett jerks back first.
Livia turns her head slowly, and I see everything in her face before she rearranges it into horror. The satisfaction. The little flash of triumph. The relief.
She wanted me to see.
My whole body goes cold in a way I didn’t know a living body could. Not numb. Worse. Awake everywhere, every nerve sharpened until the lace at my wrists feels like wire.
“Pandora,” Everett says.
He sounds exactly like he did when he crashed my car at twenty and tried to explain the dent in my bumper. Guilty, frightened, already searching for the version of the story that might save him.
I look at him, and for a moment he’s every Everett I’ve ever loved. Seventeen with grass stains on his jeans. Nineteen asleep in the library with his cheek on my notes. Twenty-two crying into my shoulder when his father got sick. Twenty-five standing in front of me in his wedding suit with another woman’s lipstick near his mouth.
My best friend’s lipstick.
I try to speak, but nothing comes out.
Livia pulls her dress back onto her shoulder with careful fingers. She doesn’t cry. She doesn’t rush toward me. She doesn’t even look properly ashamed.
That hurts more than Everett’s open shirt.
“Pan,” she says softly.
“No.” My voice returns all at once, small and vicious. “Don’t call me that.”
Everett takes a step toward me. “I can explain.”
I laugh.
It sounds ugly. It sounds nothing like a bride.
“You can explain?” I ask. “You can explain why you’re kissing my maid of honor behind a cabin while two hundred people are waiting for me to marry you?”
His face pales. “It wasn’t supposed to happen like this.”
Those words do something terrible inside me. They land too close to the fear already clawing up my ribs.
I look from him to Livia. “How was it supposed to happen?”
Livia’s mouth tightens.
Everett glances at her. Just once. Just fast enough that I might have missed it if I still trusted him.
I don’t miss it.
“Oh my God,” I whisper. “This isn’t the first time.”
“Pandora, listen to me.” Everett’s voice breaks. “I love you.”
The cruelty of that nearly bends me in half.
I look down at my dress because if I look at his face for one more second, I might fall apart in front of them, and I refuse. I refuse to give them that. The dress is perfect. The pearls still shine. The lace still holds. I look like a woman about to be cherished.
I reach for my engagement ring.
Everett sees the movement and goes still. “Don’t.”
That word makes my anger catch fire.
“Don’t?” I pull the ring off. It sticks for half a second at my knuckle, as if my own body’s trying to hold onto the last eight years. Then it comes free, cold and bright in my palm. “You don’t get to tell me what not to do today.”
Livia’s eyes flick to the ring.
There’s something hungry in the look.
I should have seen that before. Maybe I did, and maybe I called it friendship because it was easier than admitting envy could sleep beside you, borrow your clothes, hold your hand, and still sharpen itself against your life.
Everett reaches for me. “Pandora, please. Just come inside. We can talk before everyone sees.”
Before everyone sees.
Not before I break. Not before I run. Not before the woman he claims to love has to breathe through the ruin of an entire future.
Before everyone sees.
I throw the ring at him.
It strikes his cheek hard enough to make him flinch before it drops into the dirt between us. Livia gasps, but it’s too pretty to be real.
“There,” I say, my voice shaking so badly I barely recognize it. “Now you can give it to someone who earned it.”
Everett looks wounded.
That’s almost funny.
I step back, nearly tripping over my fallen bouquet. “I hope everyone sees.”
“Pandora,” Livia says, and this time there’s urgency under the softness. “Don’t go that way.”
I freeze.
She’s looking past me, toward the trees behind the cabin.
Not at Everett.
Not at the wedding clearing.
At the forest.
A chill runs through me so fast my fingers go numb.
“What did you say?” I ask.
Livia swallows. For the first time since I found them, something like fear touches her face. It’s gone almost as quickly as it appears, smoothed beneath the pretty mask she wore while pinning my veil.
“I said don’t make this worse,” she whispers.
Everett bends to grab the ring from the dirt. His hand shakes. “Pandora, please. We need to talk.”
“No,” I say.
Then I turn and run.
My mother’s warning about mud becomes meaningless. My heels sink. My dress snags on brush. Branches claw at my veil and tear pins from my hair, but I keep moving because stopping means hearing Everett’s voice again, and hearing his voice means remembering the girl who loved him this morning.
I can’t be her right now.
I can’t be any version of myself that believed in him.
The music from the clearing follows me at first, sweet and distant and obscene. A violin rises over the trees while I stumble deeper into the woods in my wedding dress, breathing so hard my ribs ache. Someone calls my name behind me. Everett, maybe. My mother. A bridesmaid. I don’t know. I don’t care.
“Pandora!”
Everett.
Of course he follows now.
I gather my skirt higher and push forward. Tears blur the trees, but they don’t fall. I won’t let them. Not yet. Not where he can see.
The forest darkens quickly beyond the lanterns. The ground dips, and my ankle twists hard enough to send pain up my leg. I catch myself on a tree, bark biting into my palm. My veil tears loose completely and drifts behind me like a ghost giving up.
“Leave me alone!” I scream.
My voice disappears into the pines.
For one moment, everything goes quiet.
Too quiet.
No music. No guests. No Everett crashing after me with apologies and lies. Only the wind moving through the branches and the frantic beat of my heart.
Then something rustles to my left.
I turn, wiping at my face with the back of one trembling hand. “Everett, I swear to God, if you come near me, I’ll scream loud enough for every person at that wedding to hear what you did.”
No answer.
The trees stand close together, their trunks black in the fading light. My breath clouds faintly in front of me. I take one step back, then another.
A raven calls somewhere above me.
The sound’s sharp enough to cut.
“Who’s there?” I ask.
My voice sounds thin now. Small. Not angry enough.
A branch snaps behind me.
I spin, heart leaping into my throat, but there’s nothing there except shadows, leaves, and a strip of torn white lace caught on a thornbush.
My lace.
I look down and realize the hem of my dress is smeared with dirt.
For some reason, that’s what nearly breaks me.
Not Everett’s mouth on Livia’s. Not the ring in the dirt. Not eight years collapsing behind a groom’s cabin. The dirt on my wedding dress.
A sob climbs into my throat, but before it can escape, a hand closes over my mouth.
My whole body locks.
The hand is gloved. Cold. Smelling faintly of smoke and something bitter, like crushed herbs left too long in rain.
I scream against it.
An arm bands around my waist and yanks me back against a hard chest. I kick, but the skirt tangles around my legs. My nails claw at the wrist near my face. The person holding me breathes once against my ear, slow and steady, as if they have all the time in the world.
I hear wedding music again.
Faint.
Far away.
Impossible.
Then a voice whispers close to my ear.
“Don’t fight the dark, Pandora Ashmore.”
My blood turns to ice.
Because I know Everett’s voice.
I know every lie it can tell.
And this voice isn’t his.
