The sirens arrived before I understood whose blood was on my dress.

One minute, I was standing beneath white roses in the garden of the Windsor House Hotel in Charleston, holding my bouquet like it was the last steady thing in the world. The next, a rented black SUV had jumped the curb, smashed through the wedding arch, and sent glass, flowers, chairs, and screaming guests flying across the lawn.

I remembered the sound first.

Metal tearing. Wood cracking. My mother screaming my name.

Then I remembered falling.

My veil tangled around my face. My knees hit the stone path. Something sharp sliced across my shoulder and down my ribs. Warm blood soaked through the satin bodice of my wedding dress, turning the pearls pink.

“Evelyn!” someone shouted.

I looked for my husband.

Not fiancé. Husband.

Twenty-seven minutes earlier, Adrian Blackwood had slid a platinum ring onto my finger and promised, in front of one hundred and twelve guests, to choose me in sickness and in health, for better or worse, until death parted us.

He found someone else first.

Summer Hale.

She was sitting near the aisle, one heel broken, mascara streaked, a thin scratch across her temple. She wasn’t unconscious. She wasn’t bleeding badly. She was crying loudly enough for everyone to hear.

“Adrian,” she whimpered, reaching both arms toward him.

And he ran.

He stepped over my torn veil.

He passed my mother, who was trying to hold a napkin against the cut on my shoulder.

He didn’t even look at me.

“Summer! God, Summer, stay with me,” he said, scooping her into his arms like she was made of glass.

I stared at him through the blur of pain.

“Adrian,” I called.

My voice came out small.

He turned for half a second. His face was pale, his jaw tight.

“I’ll be right back,” he said.

Then he carried Summer to the ambulance.

For minor scratches.

I sat in the wreckage of my own wedding, in a bloody dress, while my brand-new husband climbed into the back of an ambulance with another woman.

At the hospital, nobody could find him.

My mother, Patricia, stood beside my bed, furious and shaking, while the nurse cleaned the gash along my ribs. Twelve stitches. A bruised hip. A sprained wrist. Cuts on my shoulder and back from broken glass.

“Where is your husband?” the nurse asked gently.

I stared at the ceiling.

“With Summer,” I said.

The nurse’s hands paused for half a second.

Everyone knew Summer Hale. Adrian’s ex-girlfriend. The woman he once almost married before she left him two years ago to “find herself” in Los Angeles. The woman who had returned to Charleston three months before our wedding, suddenly single, suddenly charming, suddenly invited everywhere.

Adrian told me I was being insecure.

“She’s part of the old friend group,” he said. “You can’t expect me to erase my past.”

I didn’t ask him to erase it.

I asked him not to stare at it like he missed it.

Three days after the crash, I went back to the hospital for follow-up scans because my side had started burning every time I breathed. Adrian drove me there in silence. He had come home late the night after the wedding, smelling like hospital coffee and Summer’s vanilla perfume.

“I was scared,” he said when I asked why he left me. “She looked hurt.”

“So did I.”

He looked away.

Now, in the examination room, Dr. Helena Cross walked in holding my scans. She was in her late forties, sharp-eyed, with silver-streaked black hair pinned low at her neck.

She glanced at Adrian. Then at me.

“You’re lucky,” she said. “No internal bleeding. The wound is healing, though slowly.”

Adrian exhaled like he had been personally inconvenienced by my survival.

Then Dr. Cross looked at my wedding ring and gave a tiny, cold smile.

“I heard about the accident,” she said.

“It was awful,” Adrian muttered.

Her eyes stayed on him.

“Yes,” she said. “Especially since the bride was left bleeding while another woman was carried away for a scratch.”

The room went silent.

Adrian’s face hardened. “Excuse me?”

Dr. Cross set the folder down.

“I said what I said.”