Page 9 of How to Ruin a Wedding

I’ve always viewed wedding wrecking as helping, as saving people. Either from an incompatible marriage or a pairing like Eliza’s, where cheating is involved. Preventing them from feeling this ache of loving someone who betrayed you in this final, unforgivable way. Where you recall all the small injustices over the course of your relationship, rereading every chapter between you, searching every transgression, trying to pinpoint exactly where it all went wrong. The swift fear of having all this love but losing the vessel to hold it, wondering where you’ll put it now—if you have the ability to do that at all.

Still, I point out, “I can’t help but notice a hiddenbutthere.”

“But,” he goes on, “how do you decide to wreck a wedding? What if someone requests it, but they don’t have good intentions? And where do you even find them?”

I shake my head. “I only agree to help with wrecking the wedding when the pairing would be genuinely harmful to either party.” It was chaotic at first, but I had poured more and more energy into the idea until it ballooned into something that could stay up on its own.

“And my sister helps with the rest, making everything more streamlined,” I explain, ignoring the gnawing embarrassment of having to rely on someone whom I spent a year trying to teach to tie her own shoes. “She used to code for work and fun. So, when I came to her with the idea, she built me a website offering wedding-wrecking services. A portal for people to reach me, explain their situation, vet them, and even run marketing to anyone searching key terms likeHow to get someone to call off a wedding? Wedding ruining. Wedding Crasher. How can I leave my partner before my wedding? My son is marrying a gold digger; how do I convince him against it?And so on.

“My clients can run through my application and choose a variety of methods. I’m here to make one of the most difficult decisions of theirlives as easy as possible. I shoulder as much blame as I can, so that both parties can be left unscathed enough to move on.”

Anders looks at me with surprise, but do I see a hint of admiration as well? “This is all more elaborate than I’d think such a niche job would be.”

I smile. “Do you picture me with fake pregnancy bumps and shouting ‘I object!’ at weddings?”

His returning smile lets me know I’m not too far off. “I’ve been proven wrong. Still, it’s hard for me to wrap my head around all these people hiring you.”

“Turns out normal people turn to the internet for help instead of downing cheap wine and watching reruns ofNew Girlto fix their life problems. Go figure.”

Each time he laughs, a tinydingrings in my head like I got the answer to a trivia question correct.

“Still, pretty impressive you can make a living with this. Turn an idea into a business.”

I snort. “Making a living is a stretch,” I tell him. “Sure, I can charge a hefty amount for my services, which helps. Even if the average American can’t afford flights and hotels and wedding planners, the people whocandon’t have any real sense of the economy for the working class. I charge to make up for the lack of opportunities.”

At the surface of a memory, I grip his arm. “Once I worked on a wedding where, after a meeting, the groom sent me home with five hundred dollars for an Uber to take me just a few blocks away. When he saw my wide eyes, he asked if it wasn’t enough and threw in an extra hundred. It’s the rich that make you wonder why God left you to scrape by and earn your living while others got to eat four-dollar avocados every day.”

Another laugh. Anotherding.

“So if this isn’t making a living, what are you going to do once the jobs run dry?” Anders asks.

“Before that happens, I should have saved enough for my real goal—I’m going to buy into this animal shelter I’ve cared about since I was a teenager. The owner’s retiring soon, and if I don’t come up with my share in time, someone else will take it. And that place means everything to me.” I sigh dramatically. “The owner promised me I’d have time, but now he’s retiring earlier than expected. I have a few months to come up with my share before someone else swoops in and crushes my soul.”

“What happens if he ends up taking the other person’s offer?”

“I walk into the ocean, never to be found.”

He chuckles again.

At least I’m funny. Something positive to balance out the fact that I’m a twenty-eight-year-old two-time divorcée with no real job, or money.

“Right, you were married twice?” he asks.

I blink, but I’m sure I said that part in my head. “Yeah.” I nod. “The first time, I was freshly seventeen and desperate to care for my little sister and give her a home. He was eighteen, which wasn’t really an adult, but he had a job and an apartment, which was more than I had. So I married him, mistook security for love. He left me for one of his classmates, and, luckily, it got annulled because of my age.”

“Seventeen is too young to have so much on your shoulders,” Anders says so quietly I’m not sure he meant to say it aloud.

I shrug. “After that, I had a string of bad relationships until I got married again.”

Anders asks, “What was that jerk like?”

It makes me smile. “Ah. This one hurt the most. During one of my visits to my sister at college, I met her TA. He was sweet and kind. I loved him, really, no naivete about it. He never hurt me, not till the end. Married me because we were two years in, and it was the next step given the time we’d spent together. A good guy. He would have stayed with me forever—unwillingly resented me for it, but he would have stayed. All while being in love with his coworker.”

Anders moves a little closer. “What happened?”

“I gave him an out. I was too embarrassed to say I knew he didn’t want me, so I let him catch me making out with one of his friends. You’d think someone wouldn’t be relieved to find his wife hooking up with someone else, but he was. I hated him for it, a bit. I wish he’d just never married me, left me himself.”

I wish someone had stepped in and told him that it wasn’t right. Subconsciously, it’s probably why I jumped on the chance to wreck a wedding. It’s so much worse, being hurt by the person you love most rather than a stranger. I know so well what it’s like to feel trapped in a place not good for either party.