“My hair and makeup are done,” I say. “I’m ready. There’s thirty minutes before I need to be downstairs. I just want to talk to Frank about something.” It’s a lie. Frank is the last person I want to see. Despite the way he’s always trying to help me—help us—he’s not the person I’d run to in a crisis. Not that he doesn’t care about me. I think he really does. But the only person I can count on is me. I learned that lesson a long time ago.

“About what?” she hisses. “You’re going to be walking down the aisle to him soon enough.”

There’s a crash behind us and my sisters start assigning blame. In the split second my mother’s distracted, I manage to slip out the door. My heart pounds in my chest like I’ve just escaped a kidnapping. Slamming my whole palm against the elevator call button, I glance back down the corridor. No one’s chasing me. Yet.

The elevator doors spring open immediately, like they’re a getaway car idling at the curb. I expect Frank to be waiting for me in the lobby, but when the doors open, there’s an eerie quiet I wasn’t expecting.

I’m wearing a wedding dress. It’s not like I can fly under the radar, but I casually cross the lobby to the front door like I’m in sweatpants and my Oregon State t-shirt.

I just need some air. Some time to breathe. To think.

I step outside and it’s like there’s a roof on the world, it’s so completely full of low clouds.

“Okay, God,” I say out loud. “I don’t think we’ve actually had this talk. But I need to know whether you think I should be marrying a man twenty years older than me who I don’t love because he bought my mom’s trailer and kept my sister out of jail?”

I wait for a sign. A frog or two falling from the sky. A bird shitting on my dress. Anything.

God doesn’t respond.

I stamp my white pump into the gravel beneath my feet. “Fuck.”

“Need a lift somewhere?” a woman’s voice asks from my left. A figure in a white shirt and black pants pushes off from where she’s leaning against the wall.

Is she talking to me? A woman comes into view and I realize it’s Polly Gifford. We went to high school together, but ran in different circles. From what I heard, she got married at nineteen and had three kids before she turned twenty-three. “Polly?”

She twirls a bunch of keys around her finger and rounds the hood of the cab parked in front of the hotel. “I’ve got an airport pickup.” She shrugs. “I can drop you there.”