The Wedding Veil(12)

I turned to Alice, who was shifting anxiously from one foot to the other, the photographer by her side. “Could you give me just a second alone with Hayes before the pictures?” I asked.

Alice and the photographer looked puzzled. “But that’s kind of the point,” the photographer said. “I’m supposed to capture the first moment you see each other.”

I smiled sweetly. “We can reenact it.”

“But then…” Alice said.

“It’s all right. If Julia wants to see her fiancé alone, she should be allowed to do so,” Babs said, stepping beside the photographer. “It’s her wedding day,” she added tersely.

The photographer looked lost, and Alice took a deep breath. I was certain she was counting backward from ten in her head.

I hadn’t been sure about a first look, but Hayes had insisted. He didn’t want to be too emotional when he saw me walk down the aisle. I had agreed under one condition: I would wear the dress, but I wouldn’t wear my veil. That was the part that carried all the good luck anyway.

I walked out of the back room and entered the long, outdoor, stone-covered breezeway that connected the church with the Parish Hall and Sunday school rooms. The tap of my high heels echoed in the space. When I saw Hayes, my heart caught in my chest. Forget finance. That man could have been in movies.

There were tears in his eyes as he reached me and pulled me to him, kissing me. “You are breathtaking.” He kissed me again. “And I love you.” He stood back to admire me. “You are even more beautiful than you were at nineteen in your deb gown.”

That made me laugh. “What I mostly remember about my deb ball was someone being late because he drank too much at a Bid Day party and lost track of time.”

He laughed now too. “Yeah, but you tying my bow tie in the elevator while I changed into my tux pants…” He looked off wistfully, as though this was a story for the ages.

I raised my eyebrow. “With Babs, Pops, Mom, and Dad waiting because we were late for pictures?”

He kissed me again. I could say one thing for Hayes: he made things memorable.

I pulled back a little. “You haven’t even seen me with my veil yet,” I said playfully. That was when my stomach wrenched again. The veil… That long-standing symbol of love and happiness in my family, the good-luck charm that practically guaranteed a perfect life and marriage, was about to go on my head. Could I uphold its reputation?

“Tell me again,” I whispered. “Tell me I’m the only one for you.”

He looked at me sadly. “Julia, don’t do this; don’t ruin this perfect day. You are the only woman in the world for me. You are all I dream about, all I see. And I promise I will be the best husband you could possibly imagine.”

“All right, lovebirds!” the photographer called, appearing through one of the stone archways, Aunt Alice by her side.

“We only have six minutes of our allotted first-look time left,” Alice added in that same high-pitched tone from earlier.

As Hayes leaned down to kiss me, to reassure me that all was right with the world, the photographer began snapping. And Hayes whispered in my ear, “Don’t ever leave me. Please don’t ever leave me.”

Every nurturing instinct I had stood at attention. I had to protect him. I had to fix him. I had fixed him. If I wasn’t there, he would fall apart.

When we finished a few minutes later and I walked back into the bridal room, Sarah was there to meet me. She looked a little green.

“What?” I whispered, panicking that something else had happened.

“I might have new information. But I don’t have to tell you—”

“Tell me!” I cut her off.

“This is awful… But I guess the video has gone public because someone DM’d Catherine about it last night.”

When people were messaging my bridesmaids on Instagram, it was bad. My heart was beating out of my chest.

“So, when Hayes was in Charlotte and you were in Raleigh…” She bit her lip guiltily. “Remember, this information is coming from a total stranger—”

“Who has no reason to lie,” I interrupted, my heart now beating so loudly I could hear it in my ears.

Sarah shrugged. “Well, I don’t know. But she claims that this girl is someone named Chrissy Matthews. Apparently, she and Hayes had a little thing on and off for… well, a few months anyway, while you were in school in Raleigh. The day Chrissy found out about you, she vowed to tell you.”

I felt like I couldn’t breathe because all the pieces started to fall into place. “That must have been why Hayes proposed to me.” I said it more to myself than to Sarah.

Hayes had graduated the year before I had and moved to New York while I finished my architecture undergrad at NC State. Then, not six weeks after I graduated and we were reunited in the City That Never Sleeps, where I would be doing my internship before going back for my professional degree, he got a job offer he couldn’t refuse in Charlotte. A large bank was looking to hire a new managing director of investments, a job which, quite frankly, he was terribly underqualified for. But Hayes being Hayes, he didn’t let that deter him. We wanted to end up in North Carolina, and a job like that was unlikely to come along again. He had to take it.

But I had just started my internship at Abrams Architecture, one of the country’s most prestigious firms, in New York, and it was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up. If I was going to become a world-renowned architect, like I had always dreamed, I needed to learn from them. Then I would have enough experience under my belt that I could go back to State, complete my one-year professional degree, and sit for my licensure exam. So Hayes would move to Charlotte while I finished my degree. The plan was set.