Seven Times I Drew Blank, Seven Times They Drew Each Other Chapter 06

Seven Times I Drew Blank, Seven Times They Drew Each Other Chapter 06

Julian pushed open the door to the suite.

The pullout couch in the living room was empty, and my suitcase was gone.

He froze for a moment, then instinctively grabbed his car keys.

Vanessa wrapped her arms around him from behind.

“Julian, where are you going? Nora just wants you to chase after her.”

“If you go now, she’ll start threatening to leave every time she gets mad.”

Julian stopped.

Whenever I cried, Vanessa said I was playing the victim. Whenever I got angry, she warned Julian

not to give in to me.

So after every argument, he waited for me to be the one who backed down first.

This time was no different.

He stood in the doorway for a long moment before finally putting down his keys.

“You’re right. Let her cool off for the night.”

“She’ll come back on her own tomorrow.”

The next morning, I still hadn’t come back.

Julian saw that the digital wedding invitations had been deleted and finally called the wedding planner.

“Resend the wedding invitation to Nora.”

There was a brief silence on the other end.

“Mr. Mercer, Ms. Ellis officially canceled the wedding last night.”

“All the guests have already received the cancellation notice.”

Julian’s brows drew together sharply.

“Who authorized you to cancel it?”

“The contract is in Ms. Ellis’s name, and she paid the wedding expenses herself.”

“She had the authority to cancel.”

Only then did Julian remember that the wedding had been almost entirely my responsibility.

I had handled nearly everything, from the venue to the wedding favors.

He had only glanced at the budget at the very end and complained that I was putting too much into

the wedding.

“The wedding is just a formality. Good enough is fine.”

That “good enough” had taken me visits to more than twenty hotels, samples of over thirty kinds of chocolates for the wedding favors, and late nights checking every guest’s information.

I did all of it because I didn’t want him to be embarrassed in front of his family and friends.

Yet he didn’t even know whose name was on the wedding contract.

On the way home, there was no one handling the logistics for them anymore.

For the first time, the five of them realized just how chaotic the trip became without me.

The car service hadn’t been extended, no one was keeping track of the luggage, Vanessa had left her passport at the hotel, and Derek still hadn’t gotten a refund for the surfing excursion he had

booked.

Everyone was scrambling.

Miles finally complained, “Why didn’t Nora tell us what still needed to be taken care of?”

Julian suddenly looked up.

“Why should she have to?”

Miles blinked at him.

“Hasn’t she always handled this stuff?”

She had always been the one who handled everything.

They were used to me booking flights, checking the weather, and packing whatever medication we might need.

They were used to me picking up the tab after every get-together.

When it was time for a group photo, they were used to handing me the phone.

They had even gotten used to making me sit somewhere else when the table was full, sleep on the living-room couch, and eat other people’s leftovers.

Because I had never said no, they had come to take all of it for granted.

Derek tried to smooth things over.

“Come on. Nora’s just making a fuss.”

“Once we get home, Julian can say a few nice things and she’ll get over it.’

Julian said nothing.

He opened my Instagram profile.

My latest post was from six months earlier.

It was a group photo from a trip the six of us had taken. The five of them were standing together by

the ocean.

Once again, I wasn’t in the photo.

The caption read:

[Another day behind the camera.]

Julian had replied in the comments:

[When you’re good at something, you just get more work.]

Looking at those words now, they cut like a knife,

All that time, I had been asking them to notice me in the lightest way I knew how.

Not one of them had realized it.