My father’s house looked exactly as it had the day I left it two years earlier.
The long gravel drive curved between cypress trees silvered by moonlight, and the windows glowed with the same warm amber light my mother used to leave on whenever I came home late from college. For a moment, sitting behind the wheel of the rideshare in my hoodie and wrinkled jeans, I was twenty-one again, coming home after an exam, carrying too many books and pretending I was not afraid of becoming the woman everyone expected me to be.
But I was not twenty-one anymore.
I was twenty-eight. Married for six hours. Betrayed for three.
And the wedding dress I had folded into a hotel laundry bag beside me still smelled faintly of roses, champagne, and dust from beneath the bed.
The driver glanced at me in the rearview mirror.
“Big night?” he asked gently.
