I shoved it into my carry-on. I’d deal with it when I got home.
Camden’s face flashed in my mind and I tried to shove it away. I couldn’t think about him now. Especially when all of my instincts were screaming at me to find him, go after him so that he could understand why I’d done it and maybe we could work things out.
But hadn’t he already given me his answer? He didn’t want anything to do with me and I wasn’t going to chase after him like some kind of pathetic puppy, begging for scraps of his attention.
What if I was wrong about that, though? Wasn’t it worth finding out?
I headed out of the bathroom and joined Krista, who was waiting with the taxi. I hesitated.
Go after him, my mom’s voice said. I couldn’t. I had things to take care of. Plus, this was kind of her fault. She had such high expectations for me that I couldn’t tolerate when relationships weren’t perfect. I never left room for failure or to take risks or get my heart broken. And this was why. I’d taken that risk. I’d been willing to ask Sadie to break the NDA so that I could have a shot with Camden. And for what? To watch him walk away?
I couldn’t chase after him because I couldn’t bear him rejecting me a second time. I got into the taxi.
On the way to the airport I texted my attorney, knowing that he’d gone to bed hours earlier and that I might not hear from him when he woke up, given that it was still the weekend. I wasn’t sure what would happen next. I also tried texting and calling Sadie several times to tell her the way things had blown up at the reception, but still no answer.
I felt so helpless, sitting in the back seat of this taxi. So very many things had gone wrong in such a short amount of time—Camden, the reception, and now possibly my business. I didn’t know exactly what Vinnie had done. Or what he would do now. Would he tell Camden everything? Would any of this cause problems with Sadie? What if that video went viral? The one that had me standing helpless in the middle of all that chaos? Someone would see it. I’d been so dumb to assume that the NDAs and Taimani would keep me safe. I should have known this was a possibility.
For a second I couldn’t catch my breath as I thought of all those women who depended on me, on the company that we’d built together. I’d let them down. Everything could be ruined. I leaned forward, bowing my head.
“It’s okay,” Krista said, rubbing my back. “Whatever it is, we can figure it out.”
“Not this time,” I told her.
I turned my phone off. If everything was going to be destroyed, I’d take a few hours of not knowing just how bad the fallout would be.
I wasn’t able to sleep on the red-eye. I just kept running everything through my head over and over again. All of it was exceptionally bad, but probably the worst thing was realizing that whatever Camden had felt for me, it wasn’t anywhere close to what I felt for him. If it had been, there was no way he would have been able to walk away from me.
It helped that Krista was on a different flight. She had tried to get me to open up at the airport, but I couldn’t. I didn’t want to be that woman sitting in the middle of the terminal sobbing her guts out. She did make me promise that I would talk to her later.
She probably should have defined later, because I had no intention of talking about this at all. I squashed it all down and threw it into an inner chest, intent on locking it up and never opening it again.
I arrived in New Jersey, grabbed my luggage, and went into the bathroom to change. I put up my hair, refusing to think about Camden carefully taking it down, pin by pin.
Once I finished my hair, I realized that I’d never turned my phone back on. When I did, it just kept dinging and buzzing like I had a thousand missed texts and phone calls. There was too much to try to sort out. I pulled up Desiree’s last text to me with the address for the wedding venue, and headed out to grab a taxi.
We got on the road and I was glad that it was a morning wedding because if I’d had to wait until the evening with all my thoughts and doubts buzzing around me like a horde of angry bees, well, it wouldn’t have been good.
When I arrived, Desiree was out on the front steps of the church waiting for me. She rushed over to hug me, her relief evident.
“How are you doing?” I asked, grabbing my luggage from the taxi.
“How are you doing?” she said. “You’re the one who’s internet famous. The Bloody Bridesmaid.”
“What?” I asked. My heart slammed against my rib cage as she handed me her phone. It was a YouTube clip with Brandy flying into the cake and Dan’s grandma running around, all of us trying to stop the fight, me getting kicked in the face. I scrolled through the links and somebody had even autotuned Brandy and Maybelle’s fight.