NOT THE BRIDE HE WANTED

The rooftop garden at the Peregrine Hotel looked like something out of a magazine spread, the kind Temi Callahan used to flip past in waiting rooms and think, someone actually gets to live like this. String lights crisscrossed overhead even though the sun hadn't dropped yet. White roses spilled out of urns tall enough to hide a child behind. Somewhere below the parapet wall, forty stories of Manhattan hummed along like none of this mattered to it at all.

Temi stood near the makeshift altar in a borrowed pair of heels that were already eating into her feet, holding a clipboard she didn't need because the wedding planner, a terrifyingly efficient woman named Sable, had everything memorized down to the second. Temi's job tonight wasn't logistics. It was moral support. It was standing three feet to the left of her best friend and making sure Camille Whitfield didn't fall apart before Saturday.

"You look like you're about to throw up," Temi murmured, leaning close.

Camille laughed, too bright, too fast. "I'm fine. I'm great. This is great."

She did not look great. She looked like a woman standing at the edge of a pool she wasn't sure had water in it.

Across the aisle, the groom's side of the rehearsal was a different kind of tense. Adrian Voss stood with his hands folded in front of him, spine straight, jaw set, watching the proceedings the way Temi imagined he watched quarterly earnings calls. He wasn't unkind about it. He wasn't anything about it. He simply looked like a man executing a task on a very tight schedule, which, Temi realized as she watched him check his watch for the third time in ten minutes, was probably exactly what this was to him.

She'd met Adrian twice before tonight. Once at Camille's engagement dinner, where he'd shaken her hand with a grip that could have crushed walnuts and said maybe eleven words to her the entire evening. Once at a charity gala Camille had dragged her to, where Temi had spent forty minutes trying to figure out how someone could be that handsome and that boring at the same time, standing in a room full of people who wanted something from him, giving none of them anything back.

He was undeniably good looking. Dark hair, the kind of jaw that made photographers happy, a build that suggested money paid for a trainer rather than a desk job doing the work. But there was something carved out of him. Some room in the house that nobody had furnished.

Temi had chalked it up to being the heir to a logistics and real estate empire worth more than several small countries. Grief did that to some people. Money did too.

"He keeps checking his watch," Temi whispered.

"He's busy," Camille said, too quickly, like she'd rehearsed the defense before anyone accused him of anything.

"It's your wedding rehearsal, Cam."

"I know what it is."

Something in Camille's voice cracked at the edges, and Temi turned to actually look at her friend instead of just standing next to her. Camille's makeup was flawless. Her dress, a soft champagne slip she'd chosen for tonight specifically because it was easy to move in, hung perfectly from her shoulders. But her hands were shaking. Not a lot. Just enough that Temi noticed, because Temi had known this woman since they were nineteen years old and splitting a studio apartment in Bushwick that smelled permanently of someone else's cooking.

"Hey," Temi said, softer now, no teasing in it. "Talk to me."

"There's nothing to talk about," Camille said, and smiled the smile she used on interviewers and difficult clients, the one that meant conversation over. "I'm marrying a wonderful man in a beautiful garden and my best friend is standing right here next to me. What could possibly be wrong?"

Temi didn't push. That was the deal they'd had since Bushwick. You didn't push Camille. You waited her out, and eventually the truth came up for air on its own.

She should have pushed.

The officiant, a genial older man named Reverend Alcott who'd apparently married three generations of Voss family weddings, cleared his throat and gestured for everyone to take their places. "Let's run through the processional one more time," he said. "Bridal party, if you'll line up."

Temi took her position at the head of the line, the way she'd practiced twice already this week. Behind her, Camille's two cousins fussed with their own dresses. Ahead, at the altar, Adrian's best man, a broad, easy-smiling man named Theo who was apparently some kind of childhood friend, clapped Adrian once on the shoulder and murmured something that made Adrian's mouth twitch, not quite a smile, but close.

Temi found herself watching that almost-smile a beat too long.

"Whenever you're ready," Sable called out, and the string quartet, hired specifically for this three-minute run through, began to play.

Temi walked. She'd done this a hundred times in her head over the last two weeks, matched her steps to the tempo, kept her chin up the way Sable insisted made for better photos later. She reached the altar, took her mark, turned to watch the rest of the processional the way she was supposed to.

And that was when she saw Camille's face.

It wasn't nerves anymore. Nerves looked like Camille twenty minutes ago, bright and brittle and talking too fast. This was something else. Camille had stopped at the top of the aisle, one hand pressed flat against her stomach, staring down the long stretch of white runner toward Adrian like it was a hundred miles long instead of forty feet.

Her father, waiting beside her to walk her down, said something low that Temi couldn't hear. Camille didn't answer him. She just kept staring at the altar, at Adrian standing there in his charcoal suit with his hands folded and his watch ticking and his whole life arranged around a schedule that had never once, in his entire adult existence, allowed for the possibility of falling apart.

The quartet kept playing. Sable's smile started to look a little fixed at the corners. Reverend Alcott glanced between the bride and the groom with the patient, unbothered expression of a man who had seen every kind of prewedding jitters there was.

Temi caught Camille's eye across the distance between them.

Cam, she mouthed. You okay?

Camille's mouth opened. Closed. Her hand pressed harder against her stomach, like she was holding something in by force.

Then she looked past Temi, past the altar, toward the door that led back inside the hotel, the one propped open to let the evening air through, and something in her face went perfectly, terribly still.

The quartet reached the end of the processional piece and let the last note hang in the air, waiting for her to walk. Everyone was watching now. Adrian had stopped checking his watch. He was looking at Camille the way you'd look at a bridge you weren't sure would hold your weight.

Camille took one step backward.

Then another.

"Cam," her father said, louder this time, reaching for her arm.

She pulled free of him so fast her heel caught on the hem of her dress, and for one horrible second Temi thought her friend was going to go down right there on the white runner in front of forty guests, two photographer

s, and the entire assembled Voss family.

Camille didn't fall.

She ran.