Everything he wanted flowed from one single fact: that at the end of the ceremony, I would be his wife.

The access to the house, the reach into the savings, the legal standing to pressure and to take — all of it depended on that one word, wife, becoming true.

He did not want a marriage.

He wanted the legal consequences of one.

And so I understood that I did not actually need to cancel the wedding to defeat him.

I needed to hollow it out.

I needed to let the ceremony go forward — the dress, the flowers, the guests, the whole beautiful performance — while making sure that the one thing underneath it, the legal fact he was building everything on, quietly did not exist.