But when I stepped out of the car still wearing sneakers under the hem of my hoodie, with faint traces of bridal makeup streaked beneath my eyes, something in him cracked.
“Ellie,” he said.
I had held myself together all the way from San Francisco. Through the empty freeway, through the cold blue glow of my dashboard, through every replay of Elias’s voice in my head.
Tonight I still have to pretend.
I didn’t cry when I left the hotel. I didn’t cry when I packed my dress into a garment bag and threw it across the backseat. I didn’t cry when I passed the little taqueria where Elias had first told me he loved me.
But when my father walked toward me and opened his arms, I folded.
For a few seconds, I wasn’t a newly married woman who had just discovered her husband’s betrayal. I was a daughter standing in her father’s driveway at one-thirty in the morning, shaking so hard she could barely breathe.
