Trevor didn’t answer right away.

He just took my phone gently from my hand, turned the screen toward himself, and let out a slow breath through his nose. Another call flashed across it the moment he held it—my father again. Then my mother. Then Khloe. The marina’s soft noise suddenly felt far away, like the room itself had tilted slightly off balance. “They’re all at Victor’s event,” he said finally, voice calm in a way that didn’t match the chaos vibrating in my pocket. “The ‘millionaire fiancé’ turned out to be a guy with a rented venue, fake investors, and a very loud plan that just imploded in front of about two hundred people.” I blinked at him. “What?” Trevor tilted the phone back toward me. A new message popped up from my cousin: Police are here. Someone ran background checks. Everything’s falling apart. He handed the phone back like it suddenly weighed too much. “Your family left here to impress someone who was already lying to them,” he said quietly. “And now they’re stuck in it.”

For a moment, I couldn’t even move. The cake knife sat between us, frosting softening in the warm air, while thirty-seven empty chairs stared back at me like witnesses to something I had always been too small to question. My phone rang again, but this time I didn’t flinch. I looked at Trevor instead. He didn’t look surprised anymore—just steady, like he’d already decided where we stood. “So what happens now?” I asked. He squeezed my hand once, grounding me the way he always did when the world got loud. “Now,” he said, nodding toward the cake, toward the six people who had stayed, toward the life we had actually built, “we finish your wedding.” Outside, the marina lights flickered on one by one over the water. Inside, I set the phone face down, picked up the knife again, and for the first time all day, I didn’t look at the empty chairs.