Two days after our wedding, my husband, Evan, asked me to go to another wedding with him.
“It’s Peaches,” he said. “My close friend from college. You’ll love her. She’s been through a lot. It would mean a lot to her if we came.”
I’d heard the name maybe twice in two years. Peaches. A college friend he “didn’t really talk to anymore.” I was tired, and my feet still hurt from our reception, and I wanted to spend the weekend on the couch eating leftover cake. But it was our first week as a married couple, and I wanted to be a good sport. So I said yes.
The ceremony was at a vineyard an hour away. Beautiful. Expensive. When the bride came down the aisle, I actually gasped, because her dress was stunning. Lace, a cathedral-length train, hand-beaded sleeves. I’d looked at dresses like that and put them back on the rack. Mine had been eleven hundred dollars, on sale.
At the end of the aisle, she looked out over the guests, the way brides do. Her eyes landed on Evan. And all the color left her face. She stopped walking for a second. Her father had to squeeze her arm to get her moving again.
I thought maybe she was just emotional. Evan didn’t say anything. He just smiled and held my hand a little too tightly.
At the reception, she never came to our table. Evan disappeared for twenty minutes during the dancing. When he came back, he said he’d been “catching up with the groom.”
Four days later, a message request showed up on my Instagram. From a name I didn’t recognize. Paige Turner. Her profile picture was the bride.
“Hi. I’m so sorry to contact you like this. I’m ‘Peaches.’ I think we need to talk. Just you and me. Please don’t tell Evan.”
We met at a coffee shop halfway between our towns. She was already there when I walked in, sitting at a corner table with two coffees and a manila folder. She looked like she hadn’t slept.
“I’m going to tell you everything,” she said. “And then you can decide whether to believe me. Everything I say, I can prove.”
She and Evan had dated for three years. Not in college. Recently. They’d broken up in February.
Evan and I got engaged in January.
“He told me he wasn’t ready to get married,” she said quietly. “He said he needed space. A month later he called me and said he wanted to ‘make it up to me.’ He said he’d come into some money. He offered to pay for my wedding dress, as a goodbye gift, so I could marry someone who would treat me right. I was stupid. I was hurt. I said yes.”
She opened the folder. A receipt from a bridal boutique in the city. Twenty-two hundred dollars. Paid in full. On a card ending in 4471.
I knew that card. It was our joint account. The one we’d opened in March to save for our wedding.
“I had no idea he was engaged,” Paige said. “None. He never said a word. I saw him at my wedding, sitting next to you, with a ring on, and I almost fainted. Then at the reception he pulled me into a hallway and told me I owed him for the dress, and that I had to keep my mouth shut, or he’d tell my new husband he’d paid for it.”
She slid her phone across the table. Screenshots. Hundreds of messages, from February until three weeks before my wedding. “I miss you.” “I made a mistake.” “I think about you every day.” The last one was from the week of our rehearsal dinner. “If you told me not to go through with it, I wouldn’t.”
She’d never answered that one.
“I told my husband everything the night of our wedding,” she said. “He was hurt, but he’s still here. I’m telling you because you deserve to know who you married. I wish someone had told me.”
I drove from that coffee shop straight to my best friend Nora’s apartment. I haven’t been back home since. I’m writing this from her couch.
Evan has called sixty-one times. He’s texted that Paige is “crazy” and “jealous.” He’s texted that I’m overreacting. He hasn’t once explained the receipt.
I’ve talked to a lawyer. Because we’ve been married less than a month, and because of the fraud with our joint account, she thinks I have grounds for an annulment instead of a divorce. As if it never happened. The wedding fund, what’s left of it, has been frozen. My parents helped pay for my wedding, and they’re furious, but not at me.
Paige and I still text. Last week she sent me a photo of her wedding dress, hanging in her closet. She said she can’t stand to look at it. She’s donating it to a charity that gives dresses to brides who can’t afford them.
“Somebody should get married in it who’s actually loved,” she wrote.
I wrote back that I agreed. Then I looked at my own dress, the eleven-hundred-dollar one, in its bag on the back of Nora’s door, and decided to donate it too. Two dresses. Two weddings. One liar. I’d rather they both go to someone who gets a happy ending.
