Iris Webb POV
Iris is in the bridal suite when someone shows her the video.
She's still wearing the dress. She hasn't moved since her mother left to deal with the caterers and her father left to do something violent with his hands. The dress is wrinkled now. Mascara is running down her face in dark lines. Her hair is falling out of the elaborate updo that took three hours to create.
One of the bridesmaids, a girl named Lauren who works in marketing, walks in holding her phone like it's a bomb.
"You need to see this," Lauren whispers.
Iris doesn't want to see anything. She wants to die. She wants to go to sleep and wake up and have this all be a nightmare that didn't actually happen.
But she looks at the phone.
The video is shaky. Someone filmed it from the middle of the ballroom. And there's Grant. Clear as day. Saying all those words. Saying he doesn't love her. Saying their marriage was a mistake. Saying it like he practiced it.
And there's her. Frozen in shock. Her mouth open. Her eyes going from happy to destroyed in the space of seconds.
She looks pathetic.
The video has seventy thousand views.
By the time Iris gets to the hotel suite her parents booked for the night, it has five hundred thousand. By the time she showers and tries to eat something, it has two million. By the time she lies in bed staring at the ceiling at 3 AM, it has three million views and counting.
The comments are brutal.
"She looks so stupid"
"She probably deserved it"
"I bet she cheated on him"
"She's too ambitious. Men don't like that"
"She wasn't pretty enough to keep a billionaire interested"
People she doesn't know are analyzing her face. Her dress. Her reaction. Making up stories about why Grant would do this. Some say she must have done something terrible. Some say she probably nagged him. Some say she was boring and he realized it at the last second.
Nobody knows the truth because there is no truth to know. He just decided. He just walked away.
Her phone rings at 4 AM. It's CNN. Then MSNBC. Then every local news station in New York. They all want a comment. They all want her side of the story. They all want to turn her pain into content for their morning shows.
Iris doesn't answer any of it.
By 8 AM, the story is the number one trending topic worldwide. Hashtags are forming. Memes are being made of her face. Reddit threads are 500 comments deep analyzing what went wrong with her marriage.
Her mother calls. She's crying. "Everyone is calling. The club is calling. Your aunt wants to know if you're okay. The church wants to know what to do about the donation you made."
Iris hangs up.
Her father calls. He sounds angry and helpless at the same time. "We'll sue him. We'll take him for everything he has. We'll make sure he regrets this."
But you can't sue someone for stopping loving you. You can't make someone hurt the way you hurt. Iris learned that about three seconds after Grant walked out.
She stays in the hotel room.
Day two.
She doesn't shower. She doesn't eat. She scrolls through every article. Every headline. Every photo of her destroyed face next to Grant's cold expression. The contrast is devastating. He looks calm. She looks like someone dying.
The headlines get worse.
"Billionaire's Cold Feet Leaves Bride in Tears"
"Grant Sullivan's Wedding Day Rejection: What We Know"
"The Most Humiliated Woman in New York City"
That last one makes something inside her break.
The most humiliated woman in the entire city. Not just New York. The entire world is watching her pain like it's a reality show.
At 2 PM on day two, her phone rings. It's Richard Dane, her boss. The CEO of the company where she worked. Where she spent four years climbing the ladder. Where she was just promoted to head of strategic partnerships three months ago.
She answers because she's numb and answering feels easier than not answering.
"Iris, I'm going to be direct," Richard says. He sounds uncomfortable. "The board met this morning. We've decided to let you go."
It takes her a moment to understand the words.
"What?"
"We can't have this scandal touching the company. Clients are already calling asking if we're going to keep you. Investors are nervous. Your face is on every news station. We need to protect the brand."
"I did nothing wrong," Iris says quietly.
"I understand that. And I'm sorry. You're a brilliant strategist. But right now you're a liability. We need to move forward with someone who isn't connected to this situation."
He hangs up.
Just like that. Four years of work. Forty-hour weeks. Building strategies that made the company millions. Helping Richard through his divorces and his business problems. Listening to his inappropriate comments at company dinners and smiling like it was normal.
All of it. Gone.
She's unemployed. She's unemployable. No company is going to hire the girl who got humiliated by a billionaire on her wedding day. She's toxic. She's a scandal. She's the kind of bad luck that spreads to everyone around her.
Day three.
Her best friends stop calling.
Not all at once. One by one. Slowly. Like they're testing the water to see if association with her will ruin them too.
Sarah from Yale doesn't answer her calls. Just texts: "Hey babe, things are crazy at work right now. Talk soon." She never talks soon.
Marcus, who she's known since college, posts on Instagram about a new job. Nothing about Iris. Nothing about the wedding. Just a photo of him smiling like her entire world didn't just collapse.
Even her college roommate, the one she helped through her eating disorder, sends one text: "I'm so sorry about everything. I'm just going through a lot right now." She's not going through anything. She's just running away.
One by one, everyone runs.
Iris is sitting on the edge of the hotel bed on day three when she realizes that she's completely alone. Her parents are worried. Her friends are gone. Her job is gone. Her husband is gone. She has money in the bank but for how long. She has her apartment but she can't go back there because people know where she lives and they'll want to take pictures of her looking broken.
She has nothing.
She is nothing.
The girl everyone wanted to know a week ago is now the girl nobody wants to know at all. She went from being the woman engaged to a billionaire to being the most pathetic woman in the city in the time it took to say nine vows.
Iris stands up. She takes off the dress. She throws it in the corner of the hotel room like it's poison. She gets dressed in the clothes she wore to the wedding, wrinkled and wrong.
She goes downstairs and checks into another hotel. Not a nice one. A small one. The kind of place where nobody asks questions and nobody recognizes you. She pays cash so there's no paper trail. She tells the clerk she wants no calls transferred to her room.
She goes up to room 247.
She lies on a bed that smells like other people's sadness and stares at the ceiling.
For the first time since Grant walked out of the ballroom, Iris stops thinking about him. She stops thinking about the humiliation. She stops thinking about the loss.
She starts thinking about her body.
It's been three days since she threw up. Three days since she ate more than a few crackers. Three days of crying and drinking coffee and wondering how someone just stops mattering so completely.
She feels strange. Dizzy when she stands up. Weak in a way that goes deeper than emotion.
She goes into the bathroom to splash water on her face and her stomach lurches.
She leans over the toilet just in case.
And that's when she feels it.
Something wrong. Something that doesn't belong in a body that hasn't eaten in three days. Something that makes her stop breathing.
She runs to the pharmacy downstairs because her brain isn't working right and she needs to be sure before she thinks the thoughts that are starting to form.
She buys three pregnancy tests with shaking hands and doesn't make eye contact with the clerk.
Back in the hotel room, she lines them up on the bathroom counter and takes the first one with such force she almost breaks the stick.
Two minutes. Two lines. Positive.
Her hands are shaking so hard she can barely pick up the second one.
Two minutes. Two lines. Positive.
She takes the third one just to be absolutely sure that her life isn't about to get infinitely worse.
Two minutes. Two lines. Positive.
Iris sinks to the floor of the bathroom in a hotel room in New York City where nobody knows who she is and she realizes that she's not just carrying the pain of what Grant did.
She's carrying his baby.