Part 1: The Altar of Deceit
The silence in St. Jude’s Cathedral wasn’t peaceful; it was heavy, suffocating, and thick with judgment.
I stood at the altar, my hands clutching a bouquet of white roses so tightly that the thorns were beginning to pierce through the silk ribbon and into my palms. The pain was grounding. It was the only thing keeping me from fainting.
It had been forty-five minutes.
The organist had stopped playing the prelude twenty minutes ago. Now, the only sound in the cavernous, vaulted space was the shifting of four hundred bodies in wooden pews and the hushed, scandalized whispers that rippled through the crowd like a rising tide.
“Did he run?” someone whispered in the third row.
“I heard she isn’t even from a good family,” another voice hissed back. “A nurse. Can you imagine? Ryan Vance settling for a nurse?”
I stared straight ahead, fixing my eyes on the stained-glass depiction of a martyr. I felt like one myself.
I looked down at my dress. It was a Vera Wang, bought not with my money, but with Ryan’s credit card—a fact his mother had reminded me of every time we went for a fitting. “Don’t rip it, Maya,” she would say. “It costs more than your father makes in a year.”
My father had passed away three years ago. I had no one standing beside me today. No family to hold my hand. Just a sea of strangers—business associates Ryan wanted to impress, socialites his mother wanted to emulate, and the elite of the city who looked at me like I was a smudge on a diamond.
I risked a glance at the front row.
Mrs. Vance sat there, resplendent in a silver gown that looked suspiciously like a wedding dress itself. She wasn’t checking her phone. She wasn’t wringing her hands in worry for her missing son.
She was smiling.
It was a small, tight smile, the kind a cat wears when it has cornered a mouse. She caught my eye and raised her eyebrows, a silent mock: I told you so.
My stomach twisted. Ryan had told me he was running late because of a “work emergency.” He said he had to stop by the office to sign one last document for the merger. “It’s our future, babe,” he had texted me an hour ago. “Just wait for me.”
