I was thirty seconds from walking down the aisle when my best friend grabbed my arm and said, “Check his phone – THE PASSCODE IS YOUR BIRTHDAY BACKWARDS.”
My fiancé Derek was already standing at the altar. Two hundred guests. My parents had spent forty thousand dollars. My dress cost more than my car.
I’d known Travis since we were seven years old. He’d never lied to me. Not once in twenty-four years.
But three months ago, Travis told me Derek was cheating. He said he’d seen Derek at a hotel bar in Midtown with a woman, hands all over each other, a Tuesday night Derek told me he was in Charlotte for work.
I chose Derek.
I told Travis he was jealous. I told him he’d always had a thing for me and couldn’t stand seeing me happy. I said things I can’t take back.
Travis stopped calling. Stopped texting. Missed the rehearsal dinner.
Then he showed up at the church forty minutes before the ceremony, eyes red, wearing a wrinkled suit.
“I’m not doing this to hurt you,” he said. “I’m doing this because nobody else will.”
I told him to leave.
He didn’t.
“The passcode,” he said again. “Just check it. If I’m wrong, I’ll walk out and you’ll never hear from me again.”
My hands were shaking when I went to the groom’s suite. Derek’s phone was on the windowsill next to his cufflinks.
I typed my birthday backwards.
It opened.
The first thing I saw was a thread with someone named Megan. Three hundred messages. Photos. Plans. Dates that matched every single business trip from the last year.
I kept scrolling.
Then I found the other thread.
IT WASN’T JUST MEGAN. There were four women. Four. One of them had sent a photo of a positive pregnancy test dated six weeks ago. Derek had replied with a heart emoji.
I sat down on the floor without deciding to.
The wedding coordinator knocked. “Five minutes, hon.”
I walked back to the hallway where Travis was still standing, still waiting, still wearing that wrinkled suit.
I held up the phone. He looked at the screen, then at me.
“There’s something else,” he said quietly. “Megan – she’s not just some random woman.” He pulled a folded paper from his jacket pocket. “I didn’t want to show you this part.”
What Was on That Paper
I didn’t take it from him right away.
I stood there in the hallway of St. Catherine’s with Derek’s phone still warm in my hand and my veil pinned so tight to my head it had been giving me a headache since nine that morning. I could hear the string quartet through the sanctuary doors. Something by Bach. We’d picked it together at the venue walkthrough eight months ago, Derek’s hand on the small of my back, both of us laughing at how seriously the coordinator was taking the whole thing.
Travis held the paper out and waited.
It was a printout. Two pages, folded in thirds. The kind of thing you print at a FedEx Office when you don’t have a working printer at home, which Travis never has.
The top of the first page was a Facebook profile. Megan Pruitt. Thirty-one years old. Lives in Brookhaven.
Married.
I read that word four times.
“Keep going,” Travis said.
The second page was a screenshot of a Facebook post from eight months ago. Megan’s profile. A photo of her and a man I didn’t recognize at a restaurant, her leaning into him, him with his arm around her, both of them smiling the way people smile when someone else is taking the picture. The caption said six years and counting, still my favorite person.
The man’s name was tagged. Doug Pruitt.
I looked at Travis.
“Doug works with Derek,” Travis said. “They’ve been friends since before you and Derek started dating. Doug’s the one who introduced you two at that thing in Buckhead. Remember? The rooftop thing.”
I remembered.
I’d always liked Doug. Quiet guy, big laugh, the kind of person who remembers your drink order. He and Derek had gone to Clemson together. He was supposed to be at the wedding. He was probably in there right now, sitting in the third or fourth row on Derek’s side, waiting.
My stomach did something I don’t have a word for.
“How long have you known about Doug?” I asked.
“Three weeks.”
The Part I Keep Coming Back To
Travis had known for three weeks that Derek was sleeping with his work friend’s wife. Three weeks that he sat with that, knowing I’d already told him to get out of my life, knowing I’d said those things to him and meant them.
He still came.
In a wrinkled suit because he’d driven four hours from Savannah the night before after deciding at eleven p.m. that he couldn’t not come. He’d slept in his car in the church parking lot. That’s why his eyes were red. Not crying. No sleep.
He told me all of this later. At the time he just stood there in the hallway holding that paper out while the Bach kept going on the other side of the door and my mother was probably already crying happy tears in the front pew.
I gave him back the phone. I kept the paper.
I don’t know why. Some instinct.
I walked to the bathroom at the end of the hall. The one with the single stall and the window that looked out onto the parking lot. I sat on the closed lid of the toilet in my wedding dress and I read both pages again. Then I looked at the photo of Megan and Doug for a long time.
Doug’s daughter was the flower girl.
She was six. Her name was Callie. She had on a white dress with yellow ribbon and she’d practiced her petal-dropping for two weeks. Derek had told me that story. He’d told me Callie was nervous and that Doug had been practicing with her in the living room every night.
Derek knew. Every time he told me that story, he knew.
I put the paper in my bouquet. Between the white roses and the greenery, folded up small.
Then I went back to the hallway.
Two Hundred People
Travis was still there.
“What do you need?” he said.
That’s all he said. Not I told you so. Not what are you going to do. Just that.
I told him I needed five minutes. He nodded and walked to the far end of the hall and stood with his back to me, giving me what he could.
My maid of honor, Steph, came through the side door at a fast walk. She stopped when she saw my face.
“What happened? Your mom is asking where you – “
“I need you to go get my dad,” I said. “Just my dad. Don’t tell anyone else. Tell him to come to the hallway.”
Steph looked at me for a second. She’s known me since college. She didn’t ask anything else. She turned around and went back through the door.
My dad came out two minutes later. He’s not a big man. He’s sixty-three, he has bad knees, he wears the same style of New Balance sneaker he’s been wearing since 1997. He took one look at me and one look at Travis at the end of the hall and he said, “Tell me.”
So I told him.
Not everything. The summary. The phone, the women, the pregnancy test, the heart emoji, Megan, Doug, the flower girl who’d been practicing her petal-dropping.
My dad didn’t say anything for a minute. He looked at his shoes. Then he looked up.
“What do you want to do?”
Not are you sure. Not forty thousand dollars. Not two hundred people.
Just: what do you want to do.
I love my father. I don’t say that enough.
What I Did
I didn’t walk down the aisle.
My dad went in first. He walked to the front of the sanctuary and he said something to the officiant, a low conversation I couldn’t hear from the doorway. The officiant nodded. My dad walked to Derek and said something else. I watched Derek’s face from the back of the church. Watched it go from confused to blank to something I’d never seen on him before.
Fear, maybe. Or the particular look of someone whose math has just stopped working.
The officiant asked the guests to give them a moment. There was a murmur. Then my mother appeared at my elbow, because my mother always appears at your elbow, and she took my hand and didn’t say a word.
Derek came up the aisle toward me. He was still in his tux. He looked good. He always looked good. That was never the problem.
“Whatever you heard – ” he started.
“Four women,” I said. “I counted.”
He stopped.
“One of them is pregnant.”
He did the thing with his jaw that I used to think meant he was thinking hard. I know now it just means he’s calculating.
“We can talk about this,” he said. “After. We can figure this out.”
“Megan Pruitt,” I said.
His face.
That was the last thing I needed to see.
I handed him his phone. I handed my bouquet to my mother, which meant I was also handing her the folded paper inside it, but I’d deal with that later. I picked up the front of my dress so I wouldn’t trip on it.
I walked out the side door of St. Catherine’s into a parking lot on a Saturday in October, the sky that specific flat gray it gets in Atlanta before it decides whether to rain. Travis was behind me. I hadn’t asked him to be. He just was.
We sat on the curb next to his car, a 2019 Civic with a busted rear bumper he’d been meaning to fix for two years. My dress spread out around me on the asphalt. I was still wearing my veil.
Neither of us said anything for a while.
Then Travis said, “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t,” I said.
“I should have – “
“Travis.” I looked at him. “You drove four hours and slept in a parking lot. You’re the only person who told me the truth when it was going to cost you everything. Don’t you dare apologize to me.”
He looked at the ground. His jaw worked.
“I said some really ugly things to you,” I said. “I called you jealous. I basically told you your feelings for me made you a liar.”
“You weren’t wrong about the feelings,” he said.
I know.
I’ve always known.
That’s a different thing to sit with. I’m still sitting with it.
After
My parents did lose the forty thousand dollars. Most of it. The venue kept the deposit. The caterer worked out a partial refund because my mother is the kind of woman who can get a partial refund out of anyone. The dress I kept, which is insane, but it’s hanging in my childhood bedroom closet right now and I can’t make myself deal with it yet.
Derek moved out of our apartment within a week. I found out later that Megan had left Doug around the same time. I don’t know what happened between them after that and I haven’t tried to find out.
Doug called me once, about a month later. I didn’t answer. He left a voicemail that was mostly just breathing and then I’m sorry and then he hung up. I deleted it. I felt bad for him for about a day before I remembered that Callie practiced dropping those petals in their living room every night while Derek was texting her mother from the bathroom.
Travis and I talk every day now. It’s not the same as before. It’s actually better, in a way I didn’t expect, though I’m still figuring out what that means or what I want it to mean.
He still hasn’t fixed the bumper on his Civic.
Some things you just let sit.
—
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