Megan’s eyes moved back to Jason.

“You told me you’d been separated for almost a year.”

Jason answered, “Emotionally, Rachel and I had been over for a long time.”

I didn’t bother arguing with him. Megan had already understood what mattered.

“How long were you seeing me while you were still engaged to her?”

Jason tried to avoid the question twice before finally admitting that it had been several months.

Megan stood there for a moment, then reached behind her head and removed her veil.

She handed it to one of her bridesmaids.

“I’m not marrying you today.”

Jason immediately stepped toward her. “Megan, don’t make a permanent decision because Rachel showed up here angry.”

Megan looked at him with an expression that was almost calm.

“Rachel didn’t make this decision for me. You did when you let a woman attend your funeral while you were alive and then lied to me about what she knew.”

Jason asked her to discuss it privately, but she refused. Her father moved beside her, and Megan finally turned toward me.

“I really didn’t know, Rachel.”

I nodded. “Neither did I.”

Then she walked away.

Jason watched the ballroom doors close behind her. When he turned back toward me, the embarrassment on his face had disappeared.

Now he was angry.

“Are you happy now?”

I stared at him. “What exactly do you think I’m supposed to be happy about?”

“You came here and destroyed my wedding twenty minutes before it was supposed to start.”

Eric told him to stop, but Jason kept going. He said I could have waited until tomorrow, that there had been no reason to confront Megan in her wedding dress, and that I had deliberately chosen the worst possible moment.

For three months, I had replayed the last morning I’d seen Jason because I couldn’t remember whether I’d told him I loved him before he left. I had blamed myself for arguments that suddenly seemed unforgivably petty once I believed he was dead.

Now the man I had mourned was standing in front of me blaming me because his bride had learned the truth.

I looked through the ballroom doors at the white roses sitting on twenty-four tables.

“I didn’t destroy your wedding, Jason.”

He laughed bitterly. “Really? Because it looked pretty intact until you showed up.”

“I showed up because you hired my flower shop.”

He stopped.

I gestured toward the ballroom. “I brought the flowers. Everything else that happened today belongs to you.”

Linda stepped between us and said she knew I was angry with her. I looked at the corsage still pinned around her wrist and remembered the same woman dressed in black three months earlier.

“Why did you sit beside me at the funeral?”

Linda’s face crumpled slightly. “I didn’t know what else to do.”

“You could have told me your son was alive.”

“Jason begged me not to.”

“And that was enough?”

She looked toward him. “He’s my son, Rachel. I was trying to protect him.”

I asked the only question that mattered.

“Protect him from what?”

Linda had no answer.

Neither did Jason.

There had never been a danger he needed protection from. I hadn’t threatened him, trapped him financially, or given him any reason to believe he couldn’t leave. He simply hadn’t wanted to tell me that he no longer wanted to marry me.

An uncomfortable conversation had frightened him more than allowing me to attend his funeral.

I walked back into the ballroom, where Kayla was waiting near the entrance. One look at my face was enough for her to understand that something had gone terribly wrong.

I handed her my keys. “Can you handle teardown tonight?”

“Of course. Don’t worry about anything here.”

I looked around at the candles, place settings, floral arch, and white roses I had spent hours arranging.

“Invoice them for everything.”

Kayla nodded.

I started toward the door, then stopped and looked back at her.

“And when I say everything, I mean everything we contracted for. I’m not eating the cost of this wedding because the groom couldn’t tell the truth.”

Kayla gave me a small nod. “I understand.”

Outside, Jason followed me into the parking lot.

He asked me to wait, and this time I did.

Without his family, Megan, the bridesmaids, and the wedding venue around us, Jason suddenly looked ordinary. He wasn’t a ghost or a miracle anymore. He was simply the same man who left wet towels on the bathroom floor and forgot birthdays unless his phone reminded him.

“I panicked,” he said.

I nodded. “I believe you.”

He looked surprised by the answer.

“You do?”

“Yes. I believe you panicked, and I believe you kept making the easiest decision for yourself every time somebody else had to pay for it.”

Jason looked away. “I never meant for it to go this far.”

“But it did.”

“You don’t understand what it was like waking up after that accident and finding out everybody thought I was dead.”

I unlocked my car.

“You’re right. I don’t know what that was like. I only know what it was like believing you never woke up.”

For a while, neither of us spoke.

Then Jason finally said, “I’m sorry.”

It was the first time I’d heard those words from him all day.

Three months late.

I opened the driver’s door.

“I believe that too.”

His expression softened slightly, as though he thought forgiveness was hidden somewhere inside my answer.

It wasn’t.

“Can we talk tomorrow?”

“No.”

“Then next week, when this isn’t so raw?”

I shook my head. “There isn’t another conversation I need from you, Jason. You already gave me the answer. It just took three months and somebody else’s wedding for me to hear it.”

Then I got into my car and closed the door.

The White Rose

I didn’t drive home immediately. I pulled into a grocery-store parking lot about two miles from the venue and called the therapist I’d stopped seeing two weeks earlier because I thought I was finally doing better.

When she answered, I said the strangest sentence I had ever spoken.

“Jason isn’t dead.”

There was a pause before she asked where I was, whether I was safe, and whether I felt steady enough to drive. I looked at my hands on the steering wheel and realized they weren’t shaking anymore, but I still told her I wasn’t ready.

“Then stay where you are until you are,” she said.

So I did.

A few weeks later, Kayla told me that Megan had ended all contact with Jason. I also heard that questions had been raised about the identification error after the accident and that the family of the man who had actually died was seeking answers through an attorney.

I didn’t follow the situation closely.

For three months, I had wanted every possible piece of Jason because I believed those pieces were all I would ever have. I had saved photographs, old voicemails, clothes, receipts, and even the dried flower from his funeral.

Once I knew the truth, I wanted less.

I blocked Jason after his fourth message and Linda after her second. Eric sent one email apologizing for what he had allowed to happen, but I didn’t respond.

Life returned more quietly than I expected. Rent still had to be paid, the flower cooler needed repairing, one bride changed her centerpiece colors three times in a week, and another bride’s mother cried when I handed her the bouquet I’d made for her daughter.

Six weeks after Jason’s wedding didn’t happen, I accepted another full-service ceremony.

The bride wanted white roses.

I almost declined the job, but instead I ordered six boxes.

On the morning of the wedding, Kayla watched me open the first one and asked, “Are you sure you’re okay with these?”

I lifted one of the roses from the box. It was fresh, cold from the cooler, and perfectly white.

“Yeah. I’m okay.”

This time I meant it.

That evening, after we finished setting up the ceremony, I returned to the flower shop alone and opened the bottom drawer of my desk.

The dried white rose from Jason’s funeral was still there, carefully wrapped in tissue paper.

For months, I had treated that flower like something sacred because I thought it represented the last day I had ever been close to Jason. Now I held it in my palm and saw it for what it actually was: a brittle flower from a funeral that should never have happened.

One of the petals broke against my thumb.

I carried the rose across the shop and dropped it into the trash.

Then I opened the cooler and found two fresh buckets waiting for the next morning’s wedding. I carried the first bucket to my worktable, filled a clean vase with water, and began trimming the stems.

They were white roses again, but this time I didn’t think about Jason when I touched them.

I thought about tomorrow’s bride, the bouquet she had asked me to make, and the work waiting for me in the morning.