The Professor (Book 2)

The Eternal Vow (Bonus Scene)

I wasn't nervous.

Giselle, however, fussed around me like a mad woman, straightening out every square inch of the white silk train behind me. She kept muttering something in French under her breath I couldn't understand, but I don't think it was for me anyhow.

Focusing on myself, I looked down at the beautiful dress I was wearing—or at least I thought it was beautiful. Giselle had helped me pick it out, because the last person I wanted to go bridal shopping with was my mother.

My throat automatically clenched up as I thought about her. About the conversation I had had with her almost three years ago. It still hung in the back of my mind, even though I had tried to forget all about it. Her words were like a tattoo stitched into my brain.

It had been three years since Harry and I started dating. Four months since he proposed. Tonight, on this very evening, we were scheduled to wed, and as I looked outside on the grass which had been lit up with little white candle lights, I saw the path ahead, making a makeshift aisle.

An aisle I would be walking down alone.

Back when our relationship went public, I had received a phone call from my mother—hardly surprising since I didn't tell her ahead of time. She asked me if I was serious, if I had really given up my career and education for this man, asked if I was stupid enough to fall back on the promise of his fortune. She had lectured me on the importance of choice, of making good decisions, and forsaking all wits for a simple man. Finally, after half an hour of listening to her hypocrisy, I couldn't take it any longer.

I had exploded with years of pent up frustration and told her how she was hardly one to lecture me on good choices. How she not only once, not twice, but a million times, had disappointed me and disregarded me for some 'better' choice or man—how the 'best' decisions she had made never seemed to involve me. I had finished off by telling her that the only support I was going to take from Harry was the support I had never received from her; love.

After that, my mother went silent, hung up and didn't proceed to speak to me for a long time. Several months. When I finally did hear from her, it was via email.

She told me that she had never been so hurt by anyone else than by what I had said. That I was wrong for saying those things to my own mother, that she had done her best and she had done well. Until Harry showed up, she had gotten me to college and taught me independence, but that was all unimportant now that I had forsaken it all for a man.

She told me she was beyond disappointed and told me not to contact her again, until the day this silly thing between Harry and I was through. That when the day came, and I came crawling back to tell her she had been right, she would take me back with open arms and accept my apology.

I had stared at that email until it blurred before my eyes and the screen finally went out. I had felt numb, completely void and empty of any feeling in that moment.

– The one time I had dared to speak up, to tell my own mother of my true feelings, she had shut me down and gaslit me into thinking I was the problem.

And so now, almost three years later, I stared down at the candlelight aisle with a strange feeling in my gut.

I was walking this short path alone, but never again in life would I ever be alone.

Neither Harry nor I had decided to invite any family for the occasion, much for the same reasons when it all came down to it; his family didn't approve of me and my mother didn't approve of him. As usual, it was us against the world, and so tonight would be exactly about what it was meant to be about; Us.