Taking a deep breath, Sophie smoothed a hand over the white silk of her wedding gown. She had loved it instantly, with its simple spaghetti straps, non-dramatic V-neck, fabric floating in a subtle A-line to the ground.
“I am never going to walk down the aisle in this dress.” She hoped to sound firm, resolved, accepting. She hoped saying it out loud would help, somehow, but it didn’t.
Sighing, Sophie opened the lid of the box beside her, and contemplated its contents.
“Good-bye,” she whispered.
It was a wedding-in-a-box. Inside were printer’s samples of invitations and name plates, patterns for bridesmaids’ dresses, magazine cuttings of flower arrangements and table settings, brochures for dream honeymoon destinations.
Sophie forced herself to pick up the invitation sample that sat on the very top of the bulging box.
“Don’t read it,” she ordered herself. “Just throw it in the fire.”
Naturally, she did no such thing. In the flickering light of the bonfire she had roaring in Dr. Sheridan’s stone-lined pit, she ran her hand over the raised cream-colored lettering of the printer’s sample. It was the invitation she had selected for her wedding.
“This day,” she read, “two become one. Mr. and Mrs. Harrison Hamilton invite you to join them in a celebration of love as their son, Gregg, joins his life to that of Miss Sophie Holtzheim…”
With a choking sob, Sophie tossed the invitation into the fire, watched its ivory edges turn brown and curl before it burst into flame.
Gregg was not joining his life to Miss Sophie Holtzheim. He was joining his life to Antoinette Roberts.
For the past few months Sophie had held out hope that this was all going to get better, that Gregg would come to his senses.
But that hope had been dashed this afternoon when she had been handed a brand-new invitation, with Antoinette Roberts’s name on it. Instead of hers.
It wasn’t a wedding invitation, but an invitation to an engagement celebration at Gregg’s parents’ posh estate on the outskirts of Sugar Maple Grove.
“Gregg and I were engaged. We never had an engagement party.” Sophie felt ridiculously slighted that all stops were being pulled out for the new fiancée.
It was the final straw and set the tears that had been building all afternoon flowing freely. She was glad she hadn’t applied any makeup for her good-bye-hopes-and-dreams ceremony!
How could Claudia Hamilton, Gregg’s mother, do this to her? Sophie was the one who was supposed to be marrying Gregg. It was too cruel to invite her to the engagement party where all of Sugar Maple Grove would be introduced to the woman Gregg had replaced Sophie with!
But his mother, who had once pored over the bridal magazines with Sophie, had made her motivations very clear.
“It can’t look like we’re snubbing you, dear. The whole town is going to be there. And you must come. For your own good. Your split was months ago. You don’t want to start looking pathetic. Try not to come alone. Try to look as if you’re getting on with your life.”
Meaning, of course, it was way too obvious that she wasn’t.
“We can’t have the whole town talking forever about Gregg breaking the heart of the town sweetheart. It will be bad for his and Toni’s new law practice. It’s really not fair that he’s looking like the villain in all this, is it, Sophie?”
No, it wasn’t. This whole catastrophe was of Sophie’s own making.
“If only I could take it back,” she whispered, as she rubbed a fresh cascade of tears from her cheeks. If only she could take back the words she had spoken.
She relived them now, adding fuel to the fire in front of her in the form of a picture of a wedding cake, three tiers, yellow roses trailing down the sides.
“Gregg,” she’d said, as he was heading back to South Royalton to complete law school, and pressing her to set a date for their wedding, “I need some time to think.”
Now she had her whole life to think, to mull over the fact she had thrown everything away over a case of cold feet.
The truth was Sophie had thought she’d known Gregg as well as she knew herself. But she could never have predicted how Gregg would react. She had pictured him being gently understanding. But in actual fact, Gregg had been furious. How dare she need time to think about him? And who could blame him really?
The Hamiltons were Sugar Maple Grove royalty.
And Sophie Holtzheim was just the sweet geek whom the whole town had come to know and love for putting Sugar Maple Grove on the map a decade ago as a finalist in the National Speech Contest with, “What Makes a Small Town Tick.”
Even years after she’d shed the braces and glasses, Sophie had never quite shed her geeky image.
So, naturally, she’d been bowled over when Gregg Hamilton had noticed her.
If he seemed a little preoccupied with how things looked to others, and if he had always been more pragmatic than romantic, those could hardly be considered flaws.
Especially in retrospect!
But it hadn’t been those things that bothered her. It had been something else, something she couldn’t name, just below the surface where she couldn’t see it, identify it. It had niggled, and then wiggled, and then huffed, and then puffed and then, finally, it had blown her whole world apart.
Because when she couldn’t ignore it for one more second, when her stomach hurt all the time, and she couldn’t sleep, she had told Gregg, hesitantly, apologetically, I can’t put my finger on it. Something’s wrong. Something’s missing. And she’d slid the huge solitaire diamond off her finger and given it back to him.
But nothing could have prepared Sophie for the startling swiftness of Gregg’s reaction. He had replaced her. Rumors that Gregg had been dating a new girl around the campus had found their way home within weeks of her returning his ring.
Sophie had thought he was just trying to make her jealous. Surely what they’d had was not so superficial that Gregg could replace her within weeks?
But today, hand-delivered confirmation had come that, no, he wasn’t trying to make her jealous. She really had been replaced. It was no joke. He was not on the rebound. He was not going to realize that Antoinette, beautiful and brilliant as she might be, was no replacement for Sophie. Gregg was not going to come back to her. Ever. An invitation to an engagement party could not be rationalized away.
It was final. It was over. Over.
Claudia had instructed her not to become pathetic. Was it too late? Was she already pathetic? Was that how everyone saw her?
If Claudia Hamilton could see Sophie now, conducting her druidlike ceremony, hunched over her box of dreams in a dress she would never wear again, it would no doubt confirm the diagnosis.
Pathetic. Burning up her box of dreams, reliving those fateful words and wondering what would have happened if she had never spoken them…
“I am not going to that party,” she said, out loud, her voice strong and sure for the first time. “Never. Wild horses could not drag me there. I don’t care how it looks to the Hamiltons.”
There. She relished her moment of absolute strength and certainty for the millisecond that it lasted.
And then she crumpled.
“What have I done?” she wailed.
What had she done?
“I wanted to feel on fire,” she said mournfully. “I threw it all away for that.” She sat in the silence of the night contemplating her rashness.
Suddenly