"Still at the airport. I changed my flight. They're boarding without me."
There was silence, followed by a sound like her chair scraping the floor. "Clara, look at me," she said, forgetting we were on the phone. "Do not let embarrassment make the next decision for you. If you want to come home, I'll pick you up. If you want to take the trip, take it. But please don't get on a plane with those two just because people saw you wearing a wedding dress yesterday."
I pressed my palm to the cool glass and looked at an aircraft rolling toward the runway. Until she said it, I had imagined that returning home would mean the wedding had been pointless and that traveling alone would mean admitting I had failed at marriage before it properly began. Nina's words removed both of those traps. I had not failed by refusing a trip I had never agreed to, and I did not owe the guests at my wedding a performance of happiness.
"I'm going," I said. "For me. I paid for a week by the ocean, and I want to see the ocean."
"Then I want your flight details," Nina answered. "And I want you to eat something. You sound like you've been breathing through a straw."
I laughed once, a small harsh sound that frightened me by how close it was to crying. Nina stayed on the line while I bought a sandwich and sat where the departure boards were visible. For the first time all morning, someone waited to hear what I wanted before telling me what to do. I hadn't realized how rare that had become in the last year of my life.
My name is Clara Morgan. I was twenty-nine that Sunday, and until the previous morning I had worked hard to believe I was marrying a man who saw me clearly. I was an interior architect and co-owner of Lark & Line Design, a small Atlanta studio specializing in the restoration of historic houses, inns and public spaces. We were successful enough to employ five people and anxious enough about payroll that Nina and I still reviewed every invoice together. I was not wealthy in the dramatic way Julian liked to describe successful people, but I had built something with my own hands, and I knew the difference between a promise and a signed agreement.
Julian Hart was thirty-four, handsome in the approachable way that made strangers tell him more than they intended. He was a senior development director at Westbridge, a firm that financed and renovated hotels along the eastern coast. He could walk into a room where no one knew his name and, within half an hour, have a dozen people laughing as if he had belonged to their group for years. He had a talent for making attention feel like generosity. When that attention was directed toward me, I mistook its intensity for permanence.