The Dock
Chapter 01 - The Dock
The gangway creaked under Emily's crutches, the Mediterranean sun bouncing hard off white hulls anchored in the harbor behind her.
Guests lined the dock in linen and pearls, champagne flutes catching the light, waiting for the bride everyone had heard about but few had actually seen since she came home.
Emily stepped off the gangway slow, the way she'd practiced for six weeks, weight settling into the crutches instead of her bandaged leg. Blood had soaked through the gauze again, a dark bloom spreading against white lace at her knee.
A few guests gasped.
Her parents moved before she'd even reached solid dock, Robert dropping to one knee on her left, Diane on her right, both of them suddenly urgent in a way Emily hadn't seen from either of them in eleven months.
"Sweetheart, let us help you, please," Robert said, gripping one crutch like it was a life raft. "Lean on us."
Emily stood perfectly still between them.
She let the crutches take her weight. Didn't lean on either one.
*They're performing for the guests,* she thought. *Not for me.*
"Where was this concern," she said, voice flat and carrying, "when I needed five thousand dollars for surgery?"
Diane's hand froze mid air, fingers curled toward Emily's sleeve and going nowhere.
The dock had gone quiet around them, glasses stopped mid-clink, conversations dying in guests' throats as they realized they were listening to something they weren't supposed to hear.
"Emily," Diane said, voice cracking thin. "Please. Not here. Not today."
Emily looked past both her parents, past the kneeling and the performance, out toward the anchored yachts glittering white against blue water.
"You bought Madison a yacht that week," she said, calm and cold. "I remember exactly what mattered more to you."
Nobody moved for a long moment. Somewhere behind her, the string quartet that had been playing since the ceremony ended faltered, one violin dragging half a beat behind before catching back up.
Robert's face had gone the color of the tablecloths, and for the first time since she'd known him, Emily watched her father have absolutely nothing to say.
She adjusted her grip on the crutches, medals catching sunlight against her chest, and looked toward the reception tent where her new husband was waiting, where the people who'd actually shown up for her during the worst six months of her life were already gathered.
May you like
"Excuse me," she said. "I have a wedding to get to."
She walked past them both, crutches clicking steady against the wooden planks, leaving her parents kneeling on an empty dock in front of a hundred guests who would talk about this at every dinner party for the next year.
