Bride Number Ninety-Nine: My Groom Married Her First Chapter 10

Bride Number Ninety-Nine: My Groom Married Her First Chapter 10

Three years later, the restoration of the old church was complete.

At the opening ceremony, I stood beneath the newly lit dome, receiving applause from people who had

traveled from all over the world.

Someone asked me what mattered most in restoring a badly damaged work of art.

I thought about it for a moment.

“It’s not about making it look the way it used to.”

“It’s about acknowledging that the cracks exist, and letting it live on in a new form anyway.”

After the ceremony, I found Grant waiting outside the church.

He had grown thinner.

Once sharp and proud, his features had softened into something quieter. Marked by time.

He didn’t block my path the way he used to.

He simply stood a few steps away and set a pink mystery box down on the bench.

“I came to return something.”

Inside the box sat the ring that had once been broken.

Beneath it, a numbered card.

Ninety-nine.

Grant looked at me, his voice very quiet.

“For three years, I’ve waited every day for the number ninety-nine bride.”

“But she never came.”

I closed the box and handed it back to him.

“She’s not coming.”

His eyes went red instantly.

“I know.”

He said he knew. But his hand was shaking around the box.

“Eleanor, I just want to ask one more time.”

“If I hadn’t let Haze walk down that aisle that day-if I’d walked first with you-would we be happy right now?”

The church bell rang.

I looked at the man I had once loved for seven years, and suddenly thought of the night before our wedding.

He had held me in his arms and said over and over:

“Don’t cry tomorrow. I’ll hold your hand tight.”

Back then, we really thought we’d love each other forever.

“Maybe.”

I answered softly.

Something lit up instantly in Grant’s eyes.

But the next second, I went on.

“Too bad life doesn’t come in mystery boxes.”

“Once you’ve drawn the wrong one, there’s no drawing again.”

The light in his eyes went out, piece by piece.

I walked past him, toward the far end of the square.

Sunlight fell across the old stone road.

Behind me, Grant suddenly called out:

“Eleanor!”

I stopped for a moment, but didn’t turn around.

His voice, choked with tears, carried to me on the wind.

“Those seven years-did you ever really love me?”

My eyes stung without warning.

I lifted my head and looked up at the newly restored fresco beneath the church dome.

How could I not have loved him?

It was exactly because I had loved him so long, and so completely, that leaving had felt like being peeled apart, layer by layer, down to the heart.

But some answers, spoken aloud, only give people a hope they have no right to.

So I didn’t answer.

Behind me, there was silence for a long time.

I crossed the entire square, and Grant never caught up.

I heard, later, that he never married again.

That every year, he booked that ballroom for a wedding.

No guests. No officiant. No flowers.

Just a bowl of lobster bisque, two grapefruit candies, and a pink mystery box on a table.

He sits there alone from sunrise until deep into the night.

Year after year.

And until his hair had gone entirely gray, the number ninety-nine card in that box was never drawn.

As for me-I never went back.

Because the bride who’d been placed last had already walked out of his life that night, for good.

THE END