The wedding date approached more slowly than I thought a date on a calendar should. I had removed it from my phone and taken the printed invitations to a recycling center, but people kept mentioning it without realizing how close it was. At work, a colleague asked whether I was still taking vacation that week, and I had to explain that the honeymoon was canceled. She apologized immediately, looking more embarrassed than I felt, though afterward I spent fifteen minutes alone in the stairwell letting my chest settle.
Willow Creek Manor sent a final accounting a week before November twelfth. Another couple had booked the garden ceremony space, which allowed Meredith to return a little more of the money than I had initially expected. I wrote back thanking her for the effort, and she wished me well. I looked at the venue website once, long enough to see the arch beneath which Kinsley and I would have stood, then closed the page.
On what would have been our wedding day, I woke early at Wyatt's house without an alarm. It was cold outside, colder than the night everything began, and the trees in the yard had lost most of their leaves. I made coffee and sat at the kitchen table with Baxter resting his head on my foot. For a while I imagined my mother adjusting her dress, Frank straightening his tie, and Kinsley waiting behind a closed door while the photographer checked the light.
I didn't feel triumphant. I felt disappointed, lonely, and oddly relieved in alternating waves that made it impossible to describe the day with one honest word. I had known for months that I would not marry Kinsley, but a part of me still grieved the person I had once believed would be standing beside me. I finally understood that making the right decision doesn't guarantee the absence of sadness; sometimes it simply means choosing a sadness that has an end over one that might follow you for years.
Wyatt found me in the kitchen and asked whether I wanted company. I nodded, and he made himself coffee without trying to persuade me to feel better. We stayed quiet until the dog grew impatient for breakfast. Then he asked whether I'd like to go to a Blue Jackets game that weekend, and I said yes before remembering that I had once planned to spend those days on a honeymoon.
The next few months were built out of ordinary acts of rebuilding. I began looking for an apartment because I didn't want to turn Wyatt's hospitality into a permanent arrangement, and I needed a place whose furniture and walls belonged to my current life rather than the one I'd lost. I visited several buildings around Columbus, rejecting one because the parking garage felt unsafe and another because the living room had no natural light. Eventually I found a modern apartment in the Arena District, close enough to downtown that I could walk to restaurants, parks, and hockey games when the weather cooperated.