The Ambulance
The paramedics arrived in under nine minutes, though it felt to Roz like nine separate lifetimes. She stayed crouched beside Delphine the entire time, one hand wrapped around the other woman's wrist — not out of forgiveness, not yet, maybe not ever, but because it was the only useful thing her body knew how to do.
"Why are you helping me?" Delphine asked once, quietly, between breaths, her eyes wet. "I just destroyed your wedding."
"You didn't destroy anything," Roz said. "He did. You just made sure I found out before I said the vows instead of after."
Delphine's laugh was watery and brief. "Small mercy."
"Bigger than you think."
When the paramedics finally lifted Delphine onto the gurney, her contractions had eased to something the lead medic called "stress-induced, likely false labor, but we're taking her in to be safe" — and the relief that went through Roz's body was so total it nearly buckled her knees. She hadn't examined, until that exact second, how much she'd already decided this baby mattered to her, separate from everything its father had done.
"Is anyone coming with her?" the medic asked, glancing between Weston and Roz with visible confusion about which of them, if either, belonged to this.
"I'll go," Weston started.
"No," Delphine said from the gurney, weak but absolutely clear. "Not you. Not tonight."
The silence that followed was its own kind of verdict.
"I'll go," Priya said instead, already grabbing her clutch. "Roz, is that okay?"
Roz nodded, throat too tight to speak. As the gurney rolled toward the doors — the same tall double doors that had swung open forty minutes earlier and rewritten the entire night — Delphine turned her head and found Roz's eyes one last time.
"I'm sorry," she said. "Not for coming. I don't regret coming. I'm sorry it had to be you who paid for it."
The doors closed behind the gurney, and the ballroom exhaled as one organism, two hundred guests suddenly remembering they had bodies, phones, opinions, all of it rushing back in at once.
Weston turned to Roz, reaching for her hands again, his voice pitched low and urgent. "Roz. It's just us now. Please. Let me fix this."
Roz looked past him, at the scattered roses on the parquet floor, at her mother-in-law who wasn't going to be her mother-in-law dabbing at real tears now, at her father standing sentinel three feet away.
Then she picked up a microphone stand someone had abandoned near the band's now-silent quartet, and pulled the mic free.
"Everyone," she said, her voice ringing clean through the ballroom's stunned quiet, "I have something to say, and I want every one of you to hear it."