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The roses were cream-colored.
Vivien’s choice.
Because Derek had once said on a Sunday morning three years earlier that cream roses reminded him of his grandmother’s garden and made him feel like the world still had quiet places in it.
Vivien had remembered that.
She had written it in the small leather notebook she kept in her nightstand, the one where she collected pieces of Derek the way other women collected jewelry.
She brought cream roses to the altar because she loved him that specifically, that deliberately, that completely.
But Derek was not at the altar.
The church was full. Seventy-three guests. White ribbons on every pew. Morning light cutting gold through the stained glass above the nave.
Vivien’s maid of honor, a colleague named Patricia, stood two steps behind her, close enough to catch her if something went wrong.
Something had already gone wrong.
Vivien could feel it in the silence of a room that was supposed to be humming with the quiet electricity of a beginning, but was instead holding its breath around a secret she had not yet been told.
The doors at the back of the church opened, and Vivien’s heart lifted because she was that kind of woman, the kind who chooses hope even when the air is already shifting.
But what walked through those doors was not the beginning she had spent fourteen months building toward.
What walked through those doors was Camille Rhodes in a dress the color of champagne, her hand resting in the crook of Derek Weston’s arm as if it had always belonged there, as if it had been measured and fitted for exactly that space.
Vivien did not move.
She would think about that later, about how completely still her body went, as if it understood before her mind did, as if her bones had already processed the information and decided that stillness was the only dignified response.
She stood at the altar in her cream gown, and she watched her best friend of eleven years walk her fiancé down the aisle of her own wedding.
And the only thought that surfaced through the white noise filling her skull was this:
That is the cologne I gave him for Christmas.
She could smell it from twenty feet away.
She had chosen it herself, standing in a department store in November, spraying it on a card and holding it to her nose until she was certain.
This one. This is him.
She had wrapped it in silver paper and watched him open it on Christmas morning, watched him smile and say, “You always know exactly who I am.”
And she had believed him.
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