She turned and walked back down the aisle. Heels on carpet. Emerald against white florals. The car seat swinging gently. Guests parted with the awkward choreography of people who wanted to watch and also wanted to pretend they hadn't. At the great wooden doors, Savannah's afternoon light waited like a second judgment. Ava stepped into it and was gone.
Daniel remained at the altar in his black tuxedo, tall and suddenly smaller, dark hair neat, trimmed beard unable to disguise the ruin in his face. Madison stood three feet away in ivory and did not look like a bride anymore. She looked like a woman who had been told the truth too late and was already calculating how to survive it.
The priest closed his book.
"Ladies and gentlemen," he said quietly, "there will be no ceremony today."
The reception hall across the courtyard had already been dressed for joy — long tables, white runners, place cards in calligraphy, a band tuning soft jazz beneath a canopy of fairy lights that would have looked romantic an hour earlier and now looked like a joke the universe had not bothered to cancel. Caterers hovered near chafing dishes. Champagne waited in buckets of ice. A three-tier cake stood on a pedestal with Madison and Daniel's initials in sugar paste, a monogram for a marriage that would not occur.
Madison walked into the hall still in the ivory gown because changing would have required deciding what a woman wears after an altar collapses, and she had not yet made that decision. Her mother, Diane, followed close, a handsome woman in dusty rose with tissues already deployed. Her father, Robert, spoke in low furious tones to the wedding planner about contracts and refunds and the legal meaning of force majeure when the force majeure was a platinum blonde and an infant car seat.
Daniel stood near the cake as if proximity to sugar might invent absolution. Guests filtered in and out, unsure whether to leave, eat, or offer condolences that had no etiquette. Someone's uncle poured himself a whiskey at the bar and muttered that he had seen stranger things in Charleston. No one laughed.
Madison found Daniel by the cake because she refused to let him leave without hearing the inventory of what he had broken.
"You will not call me tonight," she said. "You will not text. You will not send flowers with a note about how sorry you are. You will pack your things out of my apartment by Monday while I am at my sister's. You will leave the key on the counter. And you will tell your parents — not me — why their seating chart just became a crime scene."