Percival stood at the altar, smiling broadly — tailored, polished, wearing the exact warm and attentive expression he had used to win me.

I walked the aisle looking at him and thinking of every night I had been credulous enough to believe him.

It was the strangest walk of my life, and I have thought about it often.

A wedding aisle is supposed to be the most sincere thirty seconds a person ever walks — every step toward the one you have chosen, in front of everyone you love.

I walked it as pure theater, toward a man I was about to destroy, in a dress I had chosen for a future that had never existed.

And yet I did not feel like a fraud, walking it, because I understood that the fraud had never been mine.