Melissa's Arc

Chapter 4 of 4

Allan stepped up beside her at the altar. The chaplain opened his book and began to speak, but the words blurred together like sugar dissolving in water. Melissa felt the weight of her father's bouquet in one hand and her mother's dress against her skin. She looked at Allan, searching his face for something to hold onto. His jaw was tight. His eyes stayed fixed on the chaplain, not on her. The silence before his storms always started this way—a muscle working in his cheek, the careful stillness of someone holding something back. Melissa's throat tightened. She had one chance to reach him before he disappeared behind that wall. Her free hand went to her neck and found the gold chain there, the one her mother had pressed into her palm that morning with no explanation. She slipped it off and held it out to Allan. "This is yours now," she said, her voice cutting through the chaplain's reading. "Everything I have is yours." Allan's eyes snapped to hers. The muscle in his jaw stilled. He took the necklace from her hand, turned it over once, then closed his fist around it. The chaplain paused, waiting. Allan's face softened in a way she hadn't seen in weeks. He nodded once, just to her, and the air between them shifted. When the chaplain asked if he took this woman as his wife, Allan answered immediately. "I do." Melissa's turn came. The guests in their formal clothes watched from the chairs arranged on the cracked cement platform. Her father stood somewhere behind them, probably regretting he'd spoken at all. The chaplain waited. Melissa looked at the man beside her—the man who'd just accepted her offering, who'd let her in for this one brief moment—and said the words that would bind them together. "I do." The chaplain pronounced them married. Allan kissed her, and she kissed him back, knowing she'd just traded a piece of gold for a fraction of his attention. She'd won this round. She'd pulled him back from the edge. And now she knew exactly what it would cost her every time she needed to do it again.