Chapter 1No Second Chances for My Amnesiac Groom

The wedding march was three measures in.

I stood at the beginning of the aisle in a strapless silk gown embroidered with thousands of micro-crystals, feeling the weight of the train pooling behind me. All I had to do was wait for Simon to walk down from the altar, take my hand, and lead me the rest of the way.

Every seat in the cathedral was taken. Across the nave, the champagne tower caught the morning light filtering through the stained glass, throwing fractured diamonds across the pews. In the front row, my mother, Susan, clutched a lace handkerchief in her trembling fist, her eyes rimmed with red, smiling with a joy so fierce it looked like relief.

Seven years.

From eighteen to twenty-five. From cramped college dorms to the anchor desk at Channel 7 News. Everyone in our circle said the same thing: Nora Hayes was the luckiest woman in the city because Simon Mercer had carried her on his palms for nearly a decade.

He stood under the vaulted archway, sharp in his bespoke tuxedo.

I gathered the heavy satin of my skirt and took a step toward him. Then another.

I was three paces away when his shoulders hitched.

Simon winced, pressing the heel of his palm hard against his temple. He swayed, his knees buckling slightly, and Marcus, his best man, lunged forward to steady his elbow.

"Simon?"

A knot tightened in my throat. I reached out, my fingers brushing the lapel of his jacket, but he snapped his head up.

The eyes that had watched over me for seven years—eyes that had always held a gentle, almost suffocating warmth—were completely blank.

He looked through me as if I were a sheet of glass. A stranger trespassing in his line of sight.

"Who are you?" he asked.

The cathedral went dead. A rustle of confusion rippled through four hundred guests like dry leaves scraping across concrete.

I froze. The train of my dress suddenly felt like cast iron anchored to the stone floor.

Simon didn’t spare me another second. He looked straight past my bare shoulder, his gaze locking onto the second row of mahogany pews on the left.

Evelyn Ward.

His childhood friend. The fragile, sickly girl whose family lived next door to his growing up—the one who claimed the world was too loud, too sharp, and that she couldn't survive without him nearby.

Simon shook off Marcus’s grip.

He walked past me with brisk, purposeful strides.

Then, beneath the gaze of hundreds of colleagues, socialites, and my weeping mother, Simon sank onto one knee on the burgundy runner.

He looked up at Evelyn, his microphone clipping his lapel, his voice low, steady, and amplified through every speaker in the vaulted ceiling.

"Evelyn, marry me."

A pause, thick as suffocating smoke.

"I’ve loved you for so long."