Loss! It’s something that shatters your life in a million pieces and breaks you forever. Overcoming the grief, if that ever happens, is the hardest part of moving forward. And I had a really hard time moving on after I lost my fiancé in a terrible car crash just months prior to what was supposed to be the best day of our lives, our wedding.
Getting back to work felt like a mission impossible, but I struggled with the rent and I just had to force myself to get back to my job. Thing was, however, that I worked as a wedding decorator, and that involved plenty of flowers, and following Adrian’s funeral, just the thought of being around flowers was overwhelming.
The hardest thing was probably never having the chance to say that final goodbye. The casket at the funeral was closed because of how badly he was injured.
Then, some three months following the tragedy, my assistant called and said she had something important and couldn’t get to a wedding venue to decorate the place, so I stepped in.
I was decorating the tables at the reception, and all of sudden I noticed Colleen, Adrian’s mother, standing close to the entrance. At first I thought my mourning brain was playing games with me, but then she saw me, and she didn’t seem sad or shocked, only afraid. Then she turned around and disappeared into one of the side halls.
It made absolutely no sense to me. I followed her, caught up, and called out to her. She stopped dead in her tracks, looking mortified and asking me what I was doing there. As soon as I mentioned that I was the florist, she froze. Before she could answer, though, the coordinator came running up and asked where she had been because the groom needed his mother.
My stomach dropped straight to the floor. Adrian had an older brother, Julian, and my first thought was that it must have been Julian’s wedding. It hurt me a little bit that I hadn’t been invited, but I just assumed that they felt bad about having me around. Then I looked down at Colleen’s corsage, which turned out to be the one I had made earlier for the mother of the groom.
I dismissed it and got back to work. Then a couple of minutes later, I caught Colleen slipping into the groom’s room. I heard her telling somebody to hurry up since the ceremony was starting in twenty minutes.
That’s when I heard a voice.
There was no mistaking that voice. It was one that I heard every morning as he bickered with me over trivial details like what flavor of wedding cake we would have. My hand instinctively went up to cover my mouth as I peered through the gap in the door.
It was Adrian. He was alive. He was standing right in front of me, wearing the exact same suit that he had bought for our wedding.
My mind immediately went into shock. Just three months ago, I was standing by his grave while his mother was sobbing next to me as I clutched her hand. People kept bringing me food, sitting with me as I stared at blank walls, and sympathized with me. But all of this was done under the watchful eye of Adrian.
I spun around, dashed into the bathroom, and locked myself in a stall before I broke down. My assistant kept calling me to check up on me. But I could not speak. I wiped away my mascara from my tear streaked face before the harsh realization came to me.
Julian tried to quiet me down, looking incredibly panicked. “Meredith, just give me a chance to explain after the ceremony.”
“No. You knew that he was alive.”
“It’s more complicated than that,” he said.
“Being betrayed by your fiancé? Not really. This is something else entirely.”
Backed into a corner, Julian broke down and told me everything. There had been an accident, but Adrian had survived the crash. Someone else had not. Rather than return home, Adrian freaked out and decided to take advantage of the tragedy as an excuse to vanish completely from his past life.
“Vanish out of marrying me?” I asked.
“Out of everything,” Julian replied.
Even before I had a chance to fully absorb this, Colleen showed up. Seeing me, she began crying and I asked her how she could possibly allow me to stand in front of a casket crying over someone who was very much alive.
She said she thought she was only protecting him, and I asked her from what.
She had nothing to say. Then, the music changed, and I saw the bride, Sarah, standing close to the entrance. She looked nervous, joyful, and totally oblivious. There was no way I could let her marry the same scam artist that I nearly married.
There was no one there who could stop me from telling her the truth about her husband-to-be. I marched up to Sarah, and spilled down everything. She thought I was some lunatic and started yelling for help. But the only person there was Collen, and she stood calm, so Sarah became aware I could be teling the truth.
Then Adrian appeared and Sarah ran towards him. “Please, tell me this woman is lying.”
Adrian said that he could explain himself. Sarah didn’t even wait to hear anything from him; she slapped him so hard that it was heard throughout the hallway.
While sobbing uncontrollably, Adrian confessed that he lied to her, saying that I already knew about everything and that the funeral was just some bureaucratic nonsense that his family couldn’t prevent.
I looked at him, completely stunned. “You let me bury you.”
“I just didn’t know how to say goodbye,” he said softly.
“So you decided to play dead?”
I took off my florist’s badge, put it down on the table and agreed with him in the sense that, indeed, something went wrong today.
I left. It just wasn’t worth my time anymore. Sarah left with her father, Colleen was sobbing at the wall, and Adrian stayed there alone in his wedding suit.
My emotions went from devastation to final relief. I realized I dogged a bullet and I was supposed to be thankful for that.
Before all this happened to me, I honestly believed things like this only happen in movies, but life has surprising ways of teaching you that everything is possible, and reality sometimes gets far more bizarre and more cruel than a Hollywood script.