1
PANDORA
The GPS said fourteen minutes.
I'd been in the car for three hours, and now I had fourteen minutes. I focused on that number instead of everything else pressing in around the edges.
Fourteen minutes, and I'd have answers.
The dress was a problem. I'd tried to bunch the skirt around my hips when I got in the car, but there was only so much you could do with twelve yards of tulle in a sedan.
The bodice was still perfectly intact—all those tiny buttons up the back that my mother had fastened one by one that morning, both of us quiet in the way we got when we were pretending everything was fine. The fabric at the waist had started to cut into me somewhere around the midway point, but I hadn't stopped.
Stopping meant thinking, and I wasn't ready to think yet.
Dane's voicemail picked up again.
“You've reached Dane Howell. Leave me a message.”
I hung up without leaving one. That was the ninth time. I'd stopped counting after seven but then started again because I needed something to do with my brain.
Nine times.
There was a reasonable explanation. There had to be. He hadn't shown—that was a fact I'd been sitting with for two hours—but people didn't simply vanish from their own weddings without a reason.
Something had happened. An emergency. A crisis. Something that explained why his phone went straight to voicemail and why my mother's expression had gone the way it went and why the whispers started filtering through the door around the forty-five-minute mark.
Then the text came.
Go to the cabin. I'll explain everything. Address below.
So I went.
I wasn't crying. I'd noticed that somewhere around the second hour of driving. I kept waiting for it and it kept not coming, and I didn't know what to do with that either.
Eleven minutes.
The mountains were dark around me. The road had narrowed about twenty minutes back, the kind that didn't forgive inattention. I was grateful for it because it forced me to keep my eyes forward.
Trees pressed in from both sides. My headlights carved out maybe thirty feet in front of me, and nothing beyond that existed.
That was fine. I only needed the next thirty feet. Then the next thirty after that.
My phone rang, and my heart lurched sideways in my chest.
Unknown number.
I let it ring. If it was Dane calling from someone else's phone, he could leave a message. If it wasn't Dane, I didn't have anything to say to anyone.
My mother had called four times. I'd let those go to voicemail too. Whatever she had to say, it would keep until I had something to tell her, and right now I had nothing.
The GPS told me to turn left.
The road got narrower.
Seven minutes.
I thought about what I was going to say when I got there. I'd run through versions of it the whole drive, the words rearranging themselves every time I tried to pin them down.What happened? Why didn't you call? What was so important that you left me—?But I kept stopping before the end of that sentence because finishing it made it real, and I wasn't ready to make it real yet.