I studied his face.
“You knew I wouldn’t agree to this. Didn’t you?”
He crossed his arms.
“I knew you’d have some concerns.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“Natalie, we’ve been planning this wedding for a year. You’ve been stressed out. Every time we talk about money it turns into a whole thing.”
“Because you keep saying everything will work out without ever saying how.”
He laughed. It came out bitter.
“And this is exactly why I didn’t bring it up sooner.”
The room went quiet.
I waited for him to hear what he’d just admitted.
He didn’t.
“I figured once the wedding was over,” he said, “once we were settled, you’d be more open to it.”
“So you waited on purpose. Until I was your wife.”
He shifted his weight.
“I wouldn’t put it that way.”
“How would you put it?”
“I thought you’d come around.”
Those four words hurt more than anything else he said that day.
For three years, I believed Seth respected what I thought. Even when we disagreed.
We’d argued about money before. About his habit of promising his relatives his weekends before checking with me first. I thought those were normal couple things.
Now I wondered how many of his decisions had depended on me eventually just giving in.
There was a knock on the door.
“Natalie?”
Paige.
“Give us another minute,” Seth called.
She didn’t go away.
“Reverend Thomas wants to know if he should start. Everybody’s sitting down.”
Seth looked at me. His voice softened.
“Please. There are seventy people out there. My parents saved up for their part of this wedding. Your aunt and uncle drove three hours.”
I knew all of that. I made the seating chart. I called the caterer twice that week. I folded every single one of those programs on my kitchen table.
“Let’s just get married,” Seth said. “Then tomorrow, we’ll sit down and figure out the childcare.”
I looked down at my dress.
I bought it eight months earlier. It wasn’t fancy, as wedding dresses go. But it was the most expensive thing I’d ever owned.
My mom cried when I tried it on.
That morning, I’d imagined Seth’s face when I walked down the aisle.
I still loved him. That’s what made it so hard.
I wanted the man I thought he was.
But I couldn’t marry somebody just because seventy people were waiting.
Another knock.
Seth leaned in close and dropped his voice.
“Don’t embarrass me in front of everybody.”
I looked up at him.
And that one sentence made everything clear.
He hadn’t apologized. He hadn’t asked me what I wanted. Not once.
He just wanted me to protect him from what he’d done.
I opened the door.
Paige was standing there with three safety pins in her hand. Her smile faded when she saw my face.
“Natalie?”
“Please go get Reverend Thomas,” I said.
Seth stepped forward. “What are you doing?”
I didn’t look at him. I looked at Paige.
“Tell him I’m not going through with the wedding.”
Sophia Rivers is an experienced News Content Editor with a sharp eye for detail and a passion for delivering accurate and engaging news stories. At TheArchivists, she specializes in curating, editing, and presenting news content that informs and resonates with a global audience.
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