Her voice caught, and I felt my stomach turn.
“There they were,” she said. “Messages and pictures from months ago. There were hotel reservations, inside jokes, and he called her ‘Lils.’ He… he said she understood him better than anyone.”
I closed my eyes, trying to keep my own anger from boiling over.
“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” I asked gently.
“Because I didn’t want to hear you tell me not to go through with it,” she said. “I needed to get to the truth on my own. I needed to make peace with it.”
“And the dress?” I asked quietly.
She looked down at it, wrinkled now, the train puddled on the floor.
“I didn’t want to wear white for a lie,” she said. “So I wore black to bury it. It wasn’t just a wedding dress. It was a funeral for the future I had thought I was walking into.”
I blinked back tears.
“But how could they, Mom? I feel so stupid!”
