I Heard My Fiancé Plan My Funeral

The chandelier comes down at a quarter past three.

I wake up on the dais with my veil bunched under one shoulder, the string quartet still finishing the processional like nothing has happened, and a sound in my head that wasn't there ten minutes ago. Six hundred guests under the Petroleum Club's coffered ceiling, every one of them quiet and watching, and I can hear all of them anyway. Not their breathing. The other thing.

Pierce kneels next to me. He takes my hand the way he took it the night he proposed on the bridge over Buffalo Bayou, both of us in coats, his thumb on my knuckle.

"Sweetheart," he says. "You look perfect today."

*[Pity she's a dead woman walking. Once her parents' trust clears, I'm free.]*

They don't know I can hear them.