Three months after burying my fiancé, I forced myself to work another wedding. Then I saw his mother slipping away from me, and her reaction immediately felt wrong.

Adrian and I were supposed to get married that summer. Everything was arranged—the venue, the dress, even the silly arguments over cake flavors. But six weeks before the wedding, Adrian died in a horrific car accident. Because of the severity of the crash, we buried him in a closed casket. At the funeral, I held his mother Colleen’s hand as they lowered him into the ground, both of us drowned in grief.

I am a florist, but after Adrian died, looking at bridal bouquets brought back too much pain. I stopped accepting wedding gigs until unpaid bills finally forced me back.

Three months after the funeral, I agreed to cover a last-minute wedding for a colleague at a reception venue I had never worked before. While setting up centerpieces, I noticed a familiar woman near the entrance.

Colleen.

When she caught me looking, her face turned from surprise to sheer terror. She immediately turned around and slipped down a side hallway.

Confused, I followed her. “Colleen? What are you doing here?”

Before she could answer, a wedding coordinator rushed up to us. “Ms. Colleen, the groom needs his mother.”

I assumed it was for Adrian’s brother, Julian. Although it hurt that I hadn’t been invited, I figured the family wanted to spare my feelings. But as Colleen hurried away, I noticed the corsage on her dress—it was the exact groom’s mother corsage I had hand-crafted that morning.

Something felt off. I followed her toward the groom’s dressing room. Colleen checked the hallway nervously before slipping inside, leaving the door cracked.

“You need to hurry,” I heard her say. “The ceremony starts in 20 minutes.”

Then a man answered.

I froze in the middle of the hallway. That wasn’t Julian’s voice. It was a voice I knew better than my own…