The Wedding Game That Cost Him Everything Chapter 56
After the event ended, Chloe and I stayed behind until the very end.
We pushed the chairs back into place one by one.
Suddenly she asked, “Have you ever thought about what would’ve happened if you’d really married Tucker?”
“No.”
“Not even once?”
I thought about it.
“At the very beginning, yes.”
When I had first arrived in Geneva, I used to wake up in the middle of the night.
In the dream, the wedding had never been canceled.
I was standing beside Tucker in a wedding dress stitched back together.
Sloane was smiling, saying the next game was about to begin.
Everyone was looking at me, waiting for me to prove I could take a joke.
After waking up, it would take me a long time to feel my fingers again.
Later, the dream came less and less.
Until I picked up surgical instruments again. Until Safe Return’s first door opened. Until those ribbons with safe-return dates were tied to the handle.
I no longer wondered what would have happened if I had stayed.
I only knew that I left.
“What about you?” I asked Chloe. “Did you ever resent me for dragging you into all of that?”
“I did.”
Her answer was direct.
“When I was most scared on that beach, I thought, if only you had never met Tucker.”
“But later, I blamed them more.”
“Meeting someone isn’t a crime. Gambling with people’s lives is.”
After she said that, she pushed the last chair under the table.
“Come on. Peace is waiting for us.”
Outside, Peace had already untied one blue ribbon.
She said she wanted to take it home as a keepsake.
“Can I?”
I looked at the date written on it.
It was the day Chloe had been found by coastal rescue.
“It was always yours.”