The name on the screen was Rachel Bennett.
My older sister.
Nine months earlier, Rachel had left my father’s house after a furious argument with Nathan, carrying a box of paperwork and telling me that one day I would wish I’d listened to her.
I hadn’t spoken to her since.
“Answer it,” I told Nathan.
“Emily, that’s not my phone.”
“Then you won’t mind.”
I accepted the call and held the phone to my ear.
“Mark?” Rachel said before I could speak.
“Please tell me she hasn’t left the church.”
“Rachel. It’s Emily.”
I heard a sharp breath, followed by a door closing somewhere on her end.
“Are you with Nathan?”
“He’s standing right here.”
“Don’t take the car anywhere he tells you to go.”
Nathan shook his head.
“She doesn’t know what she’s talking about.”
Rachel heard him.
“Ask him about the stop in Newburgh,” she said.
“Ask him why he needed your signature before you reached the reception.”
I looked at Mark.
His face had gone gray.
“What stop?” I asked.
Mark glanced toward the Cadillac.
“Nathan said it was a private errand.”
“You told me you didn’t know anything.”
“I didn’t know what it was about.”
Rachel spoke again, faster now.
“Emily, you need to look at the documents he left in the office printer on Thursday.”
Nathan lunged for the phone, but Dad caught his forearm.
“Don’t,” Dad said.
“Robert, take your hands off me.”
“Then stand still.”
Our wedding guests watched from the steps.
I suddenly understood that I could spend the rest of the afternoon trying to manage their embarrassment, or I could find out why three people around me were behaving like strangers.
“Lucy, would you ask everyone to go ahead to the estate?” I said.
“Tell them we’re dealing with a private matter and will update them shortly.”
Lucy studied my face.
“Are you sure?”
“No. But please do it.”
She took my bouquet and nodded.
I watched her cross to the church coordinator, calm in the way she’d been during every disaster of our friendship.
Then I turned back to Rachel.
“What documents?”
“An authorization for a loan against Mom’s house.”
The sidewalk seemed to shift beneath my shoes.
Our mother had died six years earlier, and she’d left a small house near Kingston to Rachel and me in equal shares.
We had kept it, despite the taxes and endless repairs, because neither of us could bear to sell the place where we’d learned to ride our bicycles.
“Nathan can’t borrow against that house,” I said.
“He shouldn’t be able to,” Rachel answered.
“But there’s paperwork with your name on it.”
I lowered the phone.
Nathan was watching me now, his expression set into something carefully wounded.
“You’re trusting Rachel?” he asked.
“After what she did to us?”
Nine months earlier, a deposit had disappeared from an account used for renovations at the Kingston house.
Nathan, who worked in property development, had offered to supervise the repairs through one of his contractors.
He’d told me Rachel had diverted the payment to her personal account.
Rachel had denied it, refused to apologize, and left.
I’d sided with the man I was planning to marry.
“I haven’t decided whom I trust,” I said.
“I’m asking a question.”
Dad released Nathan’s arm.
“You can answer it,” he said.
Nathan straightened his jacket.
“That house needed repairs.
I was trying to fix the financing without dragging Emily through every tedious detail.”
“You said there was no financing,” I replied.
“You said the repairs were paid for.”
He looked toward the church doors.
“Can we not do this in front of people?”
For the first time, I heard the request for what it was: not concern for me, but concern about who might hear.
I asked Dad why he’d known where to reach beneath the seat.
“I saw Mark put the phone there,” he said.
“Just after you took the photographs by the side entrance.
Nathan handed it to him and told him to keep it out of sight.”
“Why didn’t you say something?”
“Because I thought it was a business phone until I heard Mark ask whether you had to make the stop before the reception.
Then I heard your name and the word ‘signature.’
I was trying to ask Mark what was happening when you came outside.”
Mark looked down.
“He told me not to mention the stop until we were on the road,” he admitted.
“I was supposed to say the wedding coordinator had changed the route.”
“You agreed?” I asked.
“I needed the work.
That doesn’t make it right.”
Rachel had gone quiet on the line.
I lifted the phone again.
“How did you know to call this number?”
“Mark called me last night,” she said.
“He found my number on an invoice connected to the house.
He said he’d been asked to take you somewhere that wasn’t on the wedding itinerary.
I gave him my number and told him to call if anything changed.
This morning he stopped answering.”
Mark nodded miserably.
“Nathan told me to keep my phone off during the ceremony,” he said.
“I put it under the seat because I was afraid he’d see Rachel calling.”
“So the phone is yours,” I said.
“Yes.”
Nathan had been desperate to grab it anyway.
Not because it belonged to him, but because a conversation on that device could unravel what he had planned.
“Emily, listen,” Nathan said.
“We can sort this out at the reception.
I love you.”
I looked at the gold band on my finger.
It had been there less than fifteen minutes.
“Then tell me where you were taking me.”
He was silent long enough that a car horn sounded on the street and somebody laughed far away, unaware that my marriage had already begun to come apart.
Finally he said, “To meet a lender.”
Rachel whispered my name through the phone.
“And what exactly,” I asked Nathan, “had you already signed in mine?”
He looked away again.
I realized the hidden phone wasn’t the worst thing my father had found.
It was merely the first thing we could see.
To learn what was waiting for me in Newburgh, continue with Part 3.
