Vows in Crimson

Naomi Reyes had learned, over two decades of practicing medicine, that the body tells the truth even when the mouth won't.

She kept her hand at Wren's wrist, counting pulse, while chaos rearranged itself around them in slow motion.

"Talk to me," she said quietly, for Wren's ears only. "Any pain? Contractions? Anything sharp, anything pulling?"

"I'm fine," Wren said automatically, the reflex of a woman who had spent years insisting she was fine to people who had never once checked.

"Your pulse says otherwise." Naomi's voice was gentle but firm, the voice of someone who had delivered exactly this kind of news exactly this gently more times than she could count. "You've been standing rigid under extreme stress for several minutes while eight months pregnant. I need you sitting, I need water, and I need someone to bring me a proper first aid kit for that lip."

"It's just a scratch."

"It's a scratch on someone I'm not letting bleed at a wedding," Naomi said. "Humor me."

Lucy Tran, still trembling slightly from adrenaline, found herself suddenly useful — grabbing a linen napkin, filling a glass of water with hands that shook only a little, kneeling beside Wren's chair like the past ten minutes hadn't just rewritten everything she understood about what weddings were supposed to be.

"Here," Lucy said, offering the napkin. "For your lip."

Wren took it with a small, grateful nod.

Poppy hadn't let go of her mother's side, one small hand still fisted in the fabric of Wren's maternity dress, as though letting go might make the last ten minutes real in some new, permanent way.

"She's going to have some bruising on that wrist," Naomi said, examining the reddened skin where Ella's grip had left its mark. "Nothing broken, from what I can tell, but I want proper imaging as soon as we're anywhere near a hospital. And I want fetal monitoring. Now, not later."

"I can't afford—" Wren started.

"You're not paying for anything," Naomi cut her off. "Not today."

Julian, still standing several feet away, finally found enough of himself to move. He crouched down slowly, carefully, at a distance that still respected the enormous, uncrossable gap between them.

"Wren."

She didn't look at him.

"Wren, please."

"Don't," she said, voice low, controlled in the specific way people control their voices right before they stop being able to. "Don't do this here. Don't do this now. Whatever you need to say, I can't hear it right now. Not with blood still drying on my face. Not in front of my daughter."

"Our daughter," Julian said, so quietly it was almost lost in the wind.

Wren flinched.

"You don't get to say that yet," she said. "You don't get to just — arrive at that word. Not after five years of nothing. Not after a wedding invitation you never bothered to explain."

"I didn't know," Julian said, and his voice cracked on every word. "I swear to God, Wren, I didn't know. If I had known—"

"You would have what?" Wren finally looked at him, and there were five years of exhaustion in that look, five years of double shifts at the flower shop and midnight feedings and a daughter who asked, every single year around the holidays, why she didn't have a dad like the other kids. "Left your fiancée? Broken a contract your father signed to save the company? You didn't even fight for me when there wasn't a baby involved, Julian. What makes you think a baby changes what kind of man you are?"

He had no answer.

There wasn't one that wouldn't sound like an excuse, because it would have been one.

Naomi, sensing the moment tipping toward something neither Wren's blood pressure nor the situation could afford, stepped in with the calm authority of someone used to defusing crises.

"This conversation," she said, "can happen later. Somewhere private. Right now, my only concern is getting this woman and her baby checked out properly, and getting this little one—" she nodded at Poppy, "—somewhere calmer than a lawn full of strangers."

"I can drive them," Julian said immediately.

"No," Wren said, sharp and immediate.

"I'll take you," Naomi said instead, cutting off what would clearly have become another argument. "My car's around front. Lucy, can you grab her bag from the floral van?"

Lucy nodded and was gone before the sentence finished.

As Naomi helped Wren to her feet, careful and steady, Poppy tugged at her mother's sleeve.

"Is the pretty lady going to be okay?" she asked, looking back over her shoulder at Ella, who stood alone now near the abandoned champagne tower, arms wrapped around herself, looking suddenly very young and very lost in a dress built for a life she would apparently never live.

Wren followed her daughter's gaze.

Ella looked back at her — not with fury anymore, not with anything sharp at all. Just something hollow and stunned and grieving, the specific look of a person watching every plan they'd built their identity around collapse in a single afternoon.

"I don't know, baby," Wren said honestly. "I think she's going to have a really hard year."

"Because of the ring?"

"Because of a lot of things," Wren said. "None of them your fault. None of them mine, either."

She let Naomi guide her toward the car, one hand pressed to the small of her back, the other still holding tight to her daughter's fingers.

Behind her, she heard Julian's voice, low, urgent, talking to Ella now — words she couldn't make out and didn't try to.

She didn't look back again.

Whatever was about to unfold behind her — the accusations, the apologies, the inevitable unraveling of the Whitmore-Hale arrangement in front of four hundred witnesses and however many recorded phone videos — none of it was hers to manage anymore.