Chapter 4: The Man Who Never Came

The next morning, I went to Newport City Hall alone.

The clerk glanced over my shoulder.

“Mr. Mercer isn’t here yet?”

I tightened my grip on my folder.

“He’ll be here.”

Twenty minutes after our appointment, Grant still hadn’t shown up.

Then a message came from his assistant: “Mr. Mercer has an urgent family matter and will not be able to make it today.”

I called him immediately.

When he answered, I could hear Sloane in the background, her crying broken and breathless.

“What happened to her now?”

Grant lowered his voice.

“She had an anxiety attack, thinking about you becoming Mrs. Mercer once we signed the papers. I have to stay with her.”

“Today is also the day you were supposed to become my husband.”

“Don’t make this about her. She’s just afraid of losing her family.” His tone was already turning impatient. “Mara, legally, you’ll be my wife. What are you still so insecure about?”

A man in a suit walked into the hall and handed me a jewelry box.

Inside was a sapphire bracelet, a near-perfect imitation of the one Sloane had received.

A card lay beside it in Grant’s handwriting.

“This way you won’t feel left out.”

My fingertip brushed over the sapphire.

The first gift he had ever given me, back when we’d just met, was a pair of sapphire earrings.

He had told me blue was my color.

So he still remembered.

The part of me that had been straining to hold itself together loosened, just a little.

“Did you get the bracelet?” Grant’s voice softened on the phone. “I’ll take you to dinner tonight. We’ll reschedule city hall.”

I opened my mouth to answer when I heard Sloane cry out on his end.

“Grant, don’t go.”

“I’m here.”

He hung up.

That afternoon, Eli found me in the hotel lobby.

He took the box with my wedding shoes from me and handed me a cup of hot coffee.

“You waited alone for a long time, didn’t you?”

I didn’t answer.

In the elevator up to the bridal suite, he said casually, “Sloane and a few friends want to have a little bachelorette send-off up there tonight. The top floor has the best view. Just let her have the room.”

I turned to look at him.

“That’s my bridal suite.”

“Sloane needs a place where she feels welcomed and protected,” Eli said gently. “You can handle more than she can. People who are truly secure don’t need a room to prove who they are.”

The elevator doors opened.

I took the shoe box back from him.

“I don’t want to handle it today.”

Eli went still.

“Why do I always have to be the easy one?”

He was silent for a long moment, then said under his breath, “Because she’ll actually fall apart.”

“So will I.”

I walked out of the hotel.

Rain had started to fall, and the shoe box was soaked through in seconds.

The sapphire bracelet slipped out through a gap where the wet cardboard had come loose.

I looked down at it.

It sparkled.

The man who sent it hadn’t come.

And the man who said he would always protect me hadn’t followed me out.