Six monitors. Six angles. One bride.

Me.

I leaned over the folding table in the third-floor conference room I'd commandeered as my command center, tapping the screen for Camera Four. "Tilt up two degrees. The arch cuts off the groom's head."

"Copy that, Mira."

I straightened, pressed my palm flat against the table, and breathed.

Under the monitor sat a folded photocopy. My condo deed. The notary's stamp still bled blue at the edges. A red checkmark sat in the corner where I'd marked it this morning at 5 a.m., barefoot, in my robe.

Calloway Events. First booking.

The bride was me.

"Mira?" Tomas, my lead camera op, crackled in my earpiece. "Run me through one more time."

"Once more." I pulled my hair off my neck. "Cam One, ceremony wide. Cam Two, groom's face. Cam Three, my face. Cam Four, the arch. Cam Five, guest reactions. Cam Six—" I held up a finger. "Cam Six is the one I'm going to repeat until you hate me."

"Bridal suite hallway."

"Bridal suite hallway." I pointed at the screen showing the cream-papered corridor outside Room 318. "That cam does not turn off. Not when I'm getting touched up. Not when I'm crying. Not when somebody spills champagne. It runs from now until I walk down that aisle."

"Got it."

"Tomas." I waited until he looked into his lens. "My grandmother is in a hospice in Bangor with a tube up her nose. She has maybe a month. She's watching this on an iPad my cousin is holding to her face. If that camera blinks, she misses me leaving the room in a wedding dress. Understood?"

A pause. "Won't blink, Mira."

"Thank you."

I clicked off the comm and exhaled.

The door behind me opened without a knock.

"You're already barking orders," Damon said. "Bride of the year."

Damon Vance. My fiancé in seventy-three minutes. His tie hung loose around his collar. His jacket wasn't buttoned. He looked like a man who had three espressos and zero nerves.

"You're not dressed."

"I'm dressed enough." He came around behind me, set both hands on my bare shoulders, and hummed. "Turn around."

"Damon, I have to—"

"Turn around, Calloway."

I turned.

He found the zipper at the small of my back. The dress was ivory silk crepe, twelve fittings, paid for in installments. He drew the zipper up, slow, until the bodice closed against my ribs.

He bent. Pressed his mouth to my shoulder blade.

"There," he murmured. "Sealed in."

"Like a Tupperware lid."

"Like a contract." His lips brushed up to my ear. "If you fumble your vows, I'm reading mine off my phone, and people will know."

I laughed. Real laugh. Loud enough that Lacey, on her way through the door, paused.

It would be the last time he made me laugh that day.

I didn't know that yet.

"Mira." Lacey Bloom, my assistant, all of twenty-three, came in clutching the bridal bouquet like a newborn. "Bridesmaids are lined up. Hair's done on everyone. Um."

"Um what."

"Sienna." Lacey winced. "Sienna changed."

"Changed what."

"Her dress."

I picked up my lipstick and turned to the small mirror clipped to the monitor stand. "Into."

"Red."

The lipstick stopped halfway to my mouth.

"What shade of red."

"Like." Lacey swallowed. "Like a fire-truck red. Floor length. Slit up to here."

Damon, behind me, made a low noise. "On the maid of honor."

"On the maid of honor," Lacey confirmed.

I set the lipstick down. I counted, in my head, the way my therapist taught me. One. Two. Three.

"It's fine," I said. "Let her wear it."

"Mira—"

"Lacey. It's fine. Today everything is fine."

Damon caught my eye in the mirror. He didn't say anything. He just lifted one eyebrow, the way he did when he thought I was being too gracious for my own good.

"Go," I told Lacey. "Tell the girls to line up by height. Sienna goes last."

"Last?"

"She wants to be seen, let her be the punctuation."

Lacey nodded and slipped out, bouquet bobbing.

Damon's hand found mine. "You okay, my best friend in the whole world?"

"I'm great. I'm getting married."

"That's not an answer."

I squeezed his fingers. "I'm great."

He kissed my knuckles and let me go. "I'm heading down. Don't stand me up."

"Couldn't afford to."

The door clicked shut behind him.

I looked at the monitors one more time. Cam Six was steady on the empty hallway. Indicator light: red. Recording standby.

My grandmother's name was Ada. She used to braid my hair for school and tell me a Calloway woman never let anybody see her sweat. She was eighty-six pounds now. She'd asked me, last visit, if she'd live to see me married. I'd said yes before I had a fiancé. Before I had a venue. Before I had anything.

I'd built this whole day around that yes.

I picked up the photocopy of my condo deed. Two hundred and forty thousand dollars, leveraged for cameras, lighting, florals, and a hospice livestream feed encrypted to a single iPad in Maine.

I tucked the deed back under the monitor.

Every chip I owned, on this table.

I opened the door.

The hallway smelled like lilies and somebody's hair spray. I walked. Past the photo wall. Past the gift table. At the sign-in podium I stopped and adjusted the leather guest book. Quarter inch to the left. Quarter inch back. The pen parallel to the spine.

I'd practiced this pose four times in the mirror at home. The straightening of the book. The half-smile down at it. This was the picture. This was the second I'd told myself, for two years, would be the happiest of my life.

I held it.

Then I let it go and kept walking.

Room 318 was at the end. Tomas was posted at the corner with the Steadicam strapped to his rig. He gave me a thumbs up. I gave him an OK sign back, finger and thumb pressed tight.

"Going live in five," he mouthed.

I pushed open the bridal suite door.

Turned, one last time, toward the camera. Smiled the smile I'd been saving.

The indicator light on the Steadicam flicked from red to green.

Live.

I stepped inside. Left the door cracked, ten centimeters, the way the shot list called for. Soft light spilling out into the hall, my grandmother's window into a moment she'd waited her whole granddaughter's life to see.

Behind me, at the far end of the corridor, a streak of red moved across the carpet.

Sienna's dress. A flash of crimson, the slit catching air, fabric whispering against her calf.

She wasn't walking toward the ceremony.

She was walking the other way.

Down the hall, past the elevator bank, toward a door I couldn't see from where I stood.

The bridal suite door drifted half an inch wider on its hinge.

Cam Six kept rolling.

The makeup chair was warm under me. The mirror in front was ringed with bulbs, and behind the bulbs, propped on a rolling cart, sat the small monitor I'd had Lacey wheel in.

Three thousand forty-two viewers.

The number sat in the top right corner like a scoreboard. Below it, the screen tiled into squares — a wall of faces, each one a connected guest, each one watching me get married.

Second row. Third box.

Ada Calloway. My grandmother. Her chin was tipped down, her mouth a little open, the iPad angled wrong so I could see more of her ear than her eye. My cousin's thumb hovered at the edge of the frame.

"She's dozing," I said to nobody.

"Sorry?" The makeup artist — Renata, hired off Lacey's shortlist — leaned in with a wand of gloss.

"Nothing. The light hits her funny."

Renata smiled and dabbed my lower lip. Then she frowned at the tube. "This isn't the shade. Hang on. Ninety seconds, I've got the right one in the kit downstairs."

"Go."

She went.

The door clicked. The room exhaled.

I sat very still. The monitor hummed. Cam Six was on the lower split, the hallway shot, creeping forward on Tomas's Steadicam toward the door of this room. The door I'd left cracked ten centimeters wide.

The hallway mic picked up a laugh first.

Female. Low. Throaty.

Sienna.

Then a second voice, easy, amused.

"Knock it off."

Damon.

I lifted my eyes to the monitor. My hands stayed in my lap.

He'll push her off, I thought. He'll say her name like a warning, and she'll roll her eyes, and he'll come find me and tell me his maid of honor has lost her mind in a red dress.

The Steadicam crept another inch.

"Damon."

"Don't."

"Damon, look at me."

"I said don't."

Two seconds.

I counted them. One Mississippi. Two.

No scrape of a shoe pivoting away. No door opening. No "I have to go." Just breath, and fabric, and the small wet sound of a mouth.

"Tonight," Damon said.

His voice had dropped into the register he used in bed. I knew that register. I had a personal trademark on that register.

"Tonight what." Sienna, breathy.

"Tonight, after the toasts. After the cake. I'll deal with her. I'll tell her it's done."

"You said that in March."

"I'm saying it now. You hear me? After tonight, I'm divorcing her. We get through the day, and then it's over."

The viewer counter blinked.

3,042.

3,042.

Then the comment ticker, which had been chugging at maybe fifty a second, tipped.

Five hundred a second.

The numbers scrolled too fast to read. Faces in the grid leaned closer to their cameras. A woman in row four covered her mouth. A man in row six stood up and walked off-screen. Ada's box — Ada's box — jolted. A hand entered the frame. Not my cousin's hand. Somebody else's. Slapping the iPad. Slapping it again. Trying to wake her. Trying to turn it off. I couldn't tell which.

I watched my grandmother's box shake.

I did not move.

In the hallway, Sienna whispered something I didn't catch. Damon laughed, soft, the laugh he used to give me at three in the morning when I couldn't sleep.

I looked at the lipstick Renata had left on the vanity. The wrong shade. Too pink.

I picked it up.

I leaned toward the mirror. I parted my lips. I painted the lower one, corner to corner, in a single steady stroke. The color was wrong. It didn't matter. The line was clean.

I capped the tube.

I looked at my left hand.

The ring was a cushion-cut, two carats, financed across thirty-six months in Damon's name. I slid it off over the knuckle. It came easy. I had lost three pounds in the last week from nerves I'd called excitement.

My makeup bag sat open on the counter. I unzipped the inner pocket — the one with the spare bobby pins and a tampon and a folded twenty — and I dropped the ring in. I zipped it closed.

I checked the clock on the monitor.

Thirty-eight seconds, start to finish.

In the hallway, Damon was still talking.

I stood up.

My dress made the small expensive sound silk crepe makes when it remembers it cost six thousand dollars. I walked to the door. I did not look through the crack. I pulled it open the rest of the way, stepped into the corridor on the side opposite their voices, and turned left.

Tomas was at his post. The Steadicam was pointed away from me, toward the sound. His back was to me. He didn't see me leave the suite.

I walked.

Past the photo wall. Past the gift table. Down the curved staircase to the lobby level, one hand on the rail, the other holding the front of my skirt off the carpet.

The sign-in podium stood where I'd left it. Quarter inch to the left. Quarter inch back. Pen parallel to the spine.

The guest book was open to a fresh cream page. Three names so far, in three different inks.

I closed it.

I flipped it over.

The back cover was a smooth panel of bonded leather, the color of milk in coffee. I reached under the podium for the marker the calligrapher had left clipped to the underside. Black. Fine tip.

I uncapped it with my teeth.

I wrote one line on the back of the book.

I capped the marker. I set it down. I reached into my makeup bag — I'd carried it with me, I realized, the whole way down, looped over my wrist like a clutch — and I took out the ring. I placed it on top of the line I'd just written, dead center, the cushion-cut catching the chandelier.

I straightened the book. Quarter inch. Quarter inch.

The livestream camera mounted above the sign-in table watched me do it. Its little green light burned steady.

I didn't look up at it.

I lifted my skirt. I walked past the ballroom doors, past the kitchen pass, past a busser pushing a cart of champagne flutes who didn't recognize the bride without her bouquet. I found the staff corridor. I found the gray door at the end with the red EXIT sign humming above it.

I pushed the bar.

Outside, the loading dock smelled like cardboard and exhaust. A delivery van idled. The driver was scrolling his phone. He glanced up, saw a woman in a wedding dress, looked back down.

I let the door fall shut behind me.

Inside, on a cream leather guest book at a podium nobody was watching, my line waited in black marker, weighted by two carats.

And upstairs, Cam Six kept rolling on an empty bridal suite, the door drifting wider on its hinge, ten centimeters becoming twenty becoming thirty.

Three thousand forty-two boxes watched the room I wasn't in.

The first guest to walk through the lobby would be the first to lift that ring.

The fire door clanged shut behind me. The stairwell smelled like rubber and somebody's vape.

I went down.

My heels were a problem on the metal grates, so I took them off, hooked the straps over two fingers, and kept moving. Six flights. The dress dragged behind me like a wounded animal.

On the landing between floors three and two, I stepped on my own train and almost went face-first into a railing.

"Okay," I said out loud. "Okay, no."

I dropped the heels. I dug into the small white satin bag still looped around my wrist — emergency kit, every wedding planner carries one, and I had built mine for someone else's wedding nineteen times before today.

Floral shears. Stainless. Sharp enough to take the head off a calla lily.

I gathered the train in my left hand, pinched the silk crepe at knee height, and cut.

The shears bit. The fabric shrieked.

I sawed across, hand over hand, until the bottom three feet of my dress fell away in a cream puddle on the concrete. Six thousand dollars. Twelve fittings. I kicked it aside.

The trash can on the parking-garage landing had a hinged lid that said PUSH. I pushed. I stuffed the dress in. The lid swung shut on a corner of silk that refused to go down.

I shoved it the rest of the way with my palm.

My phone buzzed against my hip.

Lacey. Lacey. Lacey. Lacey. Lacey. Lacey.

The seventh call I picked up.

"Mira, oh my God, Mira, where are you, where—"

"Lacey. Breathe."

"The ballroom — Damon is — he's screaming at Tomas, he's pulled the cam off the rig, Sienna's gone, somebody saw the guest book, oh my God Mira there's a ring on the guest book—"

"Lacey."

"—and your grandmother, the iPad in Maine, your cousin keeps calling, she's saying Ada saw, Ada saw, Mira she—"

"Lacey." I planted my bare feet on the concrete. "Three things. Write them down."

A scrape of pen on paper. "Going."

"One. Kill the livestream. Now. Every feed, every box. Black it out."

"Killed."

"Two. Tell the officiant to announce the bride is unwell. Wedding postponed. Not canceled. Postponed. Use that word."

"Postponed."

"Three. Every sign-in gift box goes back out to the cars. Match them to the parking valet's list. Nobody leaves with a centerpiece. Nobody leaves with a favor. We unmake the day."

"Mira—" Her voice cracked. "What about Damon?"

"Not on the list."

"He's asking where—"

"Not on the list, Lacey."

A pause. I could hear the ballroom behind her. Somebody was crying. Somebody was laughing the wrong kind of laugh.

"Copy," she said.

I hung up.

I came out of the stairwell into the lower garage. A woman in a stripped wedding dress, barefoot, holding heels and shears. A valet looked at me once and decided very hard to look somewhere else.

I opened the rideshare app.

The address I typed was not the new place. Not the condo Damon had picked out, the one with my name nowhere on the deed. Not my mother's house in Worcester.

414 Linden. Apartment 4B.

The condo I'd signed away three weeks ago to fund six cameras and a hospice livestream. Keys due Monday. Four days mine.

The driver pulled up in a gray Camry. He glanced at the dress, the shears, my bare feet.

"Wedding?"

"Was."

He nodded once and didn't ask anything else. Best four stars I'd give all year.

I got in. I put the shears in my bag. I watched the parking garage slide away in the side mirror.

My phone lit up on my thigh.

Damon Vance — 47 unread.

I turned the screen face down on the seat.

The driver took the long way around the construction on Boylston. I didn't correct him. The meter could run. Nothing in my body wanted to arrive.

We pulled up at the corner of Linden and Cross. I tipped him in cash from the emergency kit and stepped out into a wind that smelled like rain coming.

The Camry pulled away.

I walked half a block. Stopped.

414 Linden. Six stories of pre-war brick. Third window from the left on the fourth floor — that one was mine. Had been mine. Was mine until Monday at 9 a.m.

I reached into the satin bag for my keys.

Bobby pins. Tampon. Folded twenty. Shears. Lipstick in the wrong shade.

No keys.

I closed my eyes.

The keys were in the new apartment. The one in Damon's name. On the kitchen island where I'd dropped them last night next to a bottle of prosecco he'd opened to "celebrate the night before." My toothbrush was there. My passport was there. The leather jewelry box my father had given me at sixteen was there.

Everything I owned was inside a door whose lock I no longer controlled.

A laugh came out of me. Short. Ugly.

The man walking his beagle on the other side of the street crossed to avoid me.

I sat down on the low brick wall in front of my building. The hem of what was left of my dress rode up over my knees. My feet were filthy. I didn't care.

I pulled out my phone.

47 unread from Damon. I didn't open them. I didn't read the previews. I scrolled past the thread like it was a stranger's.

I opened my contacts.

I went to the H's.

Hale, Adrian — atty. (Lacey rec.)

I looked at the name.

I tried to remember when I had typed it in. Lacey had said something — when? Three weeks ago? Four? We'd been at the printer picking up programs, and Lacey had been on her phone, and I had said something offhand, something like *if I'm ever murdered at this wedding the cops should know it was the florist*, and Lacey had laughed and then gone quiet and then said, low, *I have a guy. Just in case.*

I'd asked, *In case of what.*

She'd said, *In case of anything.*

She'd texted me a number that night. I'd saved it. I had not told her I'd saved it. I had not told myself why I'd saved it.

I looked at the name on my screen now.

Adrian Hale.

A drop of water hit the glass over his name. Then another. The brick under my legs started to darken in spots.

I lifted my thumb.

I pressed call.

The phone rang once.

The rain came down harder, plastering the cut edge of my dress to my shins, soaking through the satin bag on my wrist, beading on the screen between me and a name I had carried in my pocket for a month without admitting I was carrying it.

The phone rang twice.

A man's voice picked up on the third ring, awake, unhurried, like he had been expecting this call from someone, today, not necessarily me.

"This is Hale."