I pulled up the master file for the Thorne-Wexler wedding. The irony was a bitter pill on my tongue. There it was. Months of my life, distilled into a series of interlocking tabs. Budget. Vendor Contracts. Guest List & Seating. Timeline.
I clicked on the timeline, my creation, my masterpiece. It was a thing of beauty, a minute-by-minute breakdown of the entire wedding weekend. Every contingency was planned for.
1:15 PM: Bridal party photos, East Lawn. Note: Bring champagne flutes for prop shots. 4:30 PM: Ceremony begins. Cue string quartet: Pachelbel’s Canon in D. 7:45 PM: Best Man’s toast.
My breath hitched. The best man. Rhys. I could almost see it: him standing there, impossibly handsome in a tailored suit, a glass of champagne in his hand. What would he have said. Would he have spoken of loyalty and friendship while looking straight at me?
My carefully constructed timeline mocked me. All those neat little cells, those precise timings, they were meaningless. You couldn’t schedule a betrayal. You couldn’t create a pivot table for a broken heart. You couldn’t add a line item for the gut-wrenching, soul-stealing need that had ripped through my life like a tornado.
With a choked sob, I slammed the laptop shut. The illusion of control was gone. The spreadsheets were a lie. My entire career, my entire identity, was built on this lie: that life’s messy, unpredictable, passionate moments could be tamed, organized, and executed on a schedule.
I pushed myself up, my legs unsteady. I walked through my quiet apartment, touching the spines of the perfectly aligned books on my shelf. This was the life I had built. Safe. Predictable. Unbreachable. A fortress against the chaos Marcus had once represented. And I was suffocating in it.
The realization hit me like a slow, creeping flood. I’d believed passion was a liability, a fire to be contained. But Rhys… he hadn’t started a fire. He had held up a mirror to the embers that were already glowing inside me, embers I had spent a decade trying to smother.
I thought back to Marcus’s question. Are you in love with my best man?
In that moment, frozen in the crosshairs, I couldn’t answer. Because the truth was too big, too catastrophic. Answering “yes” would mean admitting that the man who offered safety and kindness wasn’t the man who made my blood sing. Answering “no” would have been a lie of such magnitude it would have choked me.
I stood in the center of my living room, the city lights a distant, blurry constellation. I had hit rock bottom. My business was likely ruined. I had destroyed a friendship, betrayed a client, and shattered the trust of a good man. The fallout was immeasurable.
And yet.
Underneath the shame, the fear, and the crushing weight of my failure, something else was stirring. A strange, terrifying sense of release. The worst had happened.
The fortress had fallen. I was standing in the rubble of my own making.
And I was still breathing.