Daniel's hands hung empty at his sides. "I deserve that."
"You deserve worse," Madison said. "You deserve to have done better nine months ago."
She turned. Diane caught her elbow and steered her toward a side room where the bridal party had already begun the practical work of undoing a wedding — returning gifts to boxes, calling vendors, crying in controlled increments. Madison sat on a folding chair in ivory and stared at her bare left hand, where a ring had been meant to live by sunset, and tried to remember how breathing was supposed to feel when the air itself had changed composition.
Three days later, in a rented room above a coffee shop on Broughton Street, Ava Monroe sat with Eli asleep in a bassinet by the window and replayed the aisle in her mind the way people replay car accidents — not for pleasure, but because the mind insists on mastering what it failed to prevent.
She had not slept well since the wedding. Savannah's night heat pressed against the rented glass. Somewhere below, late customers laughed over iced drinks as if the world still contained uncomplicated evenings. Eli made the small nocturnal sounds of a baby who did not know his father had stood mute at an altar while his name became a weapon.
Ava's phone lit with Daniel's name for the fourteenth time since Sunday. She let it ring into silence, then listened to the voicemail on speaker while she folded onesies that smelled of detergent and the particular sweetness of infant skin.
Madison won't speak to me. I don't blame her. I don't blame you either. I messed this up from the beginning. Can we talk about Eli? About custody? About me being his father out loud instead of in secret?
Ava deleted the message. Then she called him back because Eli's existence was larger than her anger, and she had learned, in nine hard months, that spite made a poor co-parent.