PART 3
Miles’s easy smile disappeared from his face entirely.
My father lifted one trembling hand, pointing down the aisle like the gesture itself might undo whatever he was seeing.
“How can it be you?” he shouted, his voice cracking as it echoed off the stone walls of the church. “I was certain you disappeared thirty years ago!”
Every guest in that church turned to look, first at my father, then down the aisle at Miles, then back at my father again, the murmurs starting immediately, low and confused.
I felt the floor tilt underneath me.
“Do you two know each other?” I managed to ask, my voice barely holding together.
My father whispered a name I had never once heard him say in my entire life. “Desmond.”
Miles’s eyes found mine across the length of the church, and something in his expression shifted — not confusion, the way I expected, but something closer to resignation, like he’d known this exact moment was coming for a long time and had simply been hoping to postpone it a little longer.
“It’s too late to change anything now,” he said, quiet, but the church was silent enough that his voice still carried clearly all the way to the back pews.
A chill went through my entire body.
“Now,” he said, “you’re finally going to learn the truth about why I’m marrying you.”
PART 4
My father’s knees buckled fully this time, and it took both me and my uncle, who’d been sitting in the front pew, to get him safely into a chair near the vestibule while two hundred wedding guests sat in absolute, stunned silence behind us.
“Someone needs to explain what’s happening,” I said, my voice shaking, looking between my father’s ashen face and Miles, who had walked halfway back down the aisle toward us, close enough now that I could see his own hands weren’t entirely steady either.
“My name isn’t actually just Miles Hale,” he said quietly. “It’s Miles Desmond Hale. Desmond was my father’s name too.”
My father made a sound I’d never heard him make before, something between a laugh and a sob.
“You’re not him,” he said slowly, understanding visibly working its way across his face even as he said it. “You’re his son. My God. You look exactly like he did, standing at his own wedding thirty-one years ago. I thought—for one second, I genuinely thought—”
“I know what you thought,” Miles said. “I’ve been told my whole life that I’m the spitting image of a man I never actually got to meet.”
