Chapter 1 — I Didn’t Run Away

“I didn’t run away from our wedding, Callahan,” Vivienne whispered, so faintly I had to lean close to hear it.

“I was taken.” And then her eyes closed again, and I was left holding the whole of my ruined understanding of the last three days.

Because for three days I had believed — everyone had made very sure I believed — that she had left me standing at the altar of my own life.

I live in Maple Ridge, a small, tight mountain town in the Pacific Northwest, the kind of place where a juicy piece of gossip travels from house to house faster than the morning coffee cools, and where everyone knows your business before you have finished conducting it.

And for three days, that town had been merciless.

My fiancee had vanished on our wedding morning, and in the absence of any facts, the town had simply invented some: that she had another man, that she had come to her senses about a mill worker like me, that I was a fool for ever having trusted a girl so quiet.

I had walked through those three days under the weight of a hundred pitying, knowing stares, believing every one of them, hating her a little more with each one.

And then I found her, and the whole invented story died in an instant, because the truth of what had actually happened to her was lying in the mud at my feet, and no invented story survives the truth for very long, once the truth finally shows its face.

But I have to be honest, at the very start of this, about my own part in the invented story, because it would be easy to tell this as a tale in which I was always the faithful one, the man who never doubted, and it would be a lie, and I have learned to hate lies.

I doubted her.

For three days, I believed the town’s story about the woman I was supposed to marry, and I want to sit in that shame for a moment rather than rush past it, because it is important.

When Vivienne did not appear at that altar, I did not think, something is wrong, something has happened to her, I must find her.

I thought what everyone thought.

I thought she had left me.

I let a whole town’s gossip write over three years of knowing her, in the space of a single afternoon, and I spent three days nursing a wound she had not given me and hating her for a betrayal she had not committed.

If I had not taken that shortcut through the woods, if that scrap of lace had not caught my eye, I do not know how long I would have gone on believing it.

Maybe forever.