Lantern Lake by Lily Everett

of the best times of my life in that apartment, but I didn’t want to live there forever. And when my parents got the address from the R.A. on my dorm hall, and confronted me there—” She broke off, overwhelmed for a moment by the image of her expensively dressed parents picking their way through the cheerful clutter of the small studio. The look on her mother’s face when she saw how Vivian had been living…and when she saw what Vivian was wearing.
    “Where was I during all this?” Cooper demanded.
    “You were already at the courthouse,” Vivian said faintly. “I had class, remember? So I was going to meet you there. I wanted to skip it, but you said…”
    Her throat went tight, choking off the words, and Cooper’s expression went flat and distant.
    “I said we’d have all the time in the world to be together after we were married. A few more minutes apart wouldn’t matter.”
    Miserable, Vivian felt her shoulders slump as she nodded. “I’d gone home to change—so my parents walked in on me wearing a white dress and holding that pillbox hat with the veil I bought at that vintage shop on Fulton Street. And they knew.”
    “So what?” Cooper shook his head, frowning fiercely. “What difference did it make if they knew you were getting married? You were over the age of consent. All you had to do was walk out that door and come meet me.”
    “It wasn’t that simple,” Vivian protested. “They’re my parents—I grew up trying desperately to make them proud of me, and failing ninety percent of the time. Nothing I did was ever good enough, but that only made me try harder. Until that day.”
    Cooper’s eyes were as hard as moss-covered stones, opaque and judgmental. “They forbid you to marry me. And you caved.”
    That was the stark truth of it. Vivian wished she could argue, that she could point to some heroic motive, but nothing she said would change the fact that if she’d defied her parents, she would have spent the last ten years a far happier woman. And she never would have hurt Cooper so badly. “I was wrong,” she confessed baldly. “I’m sorry. I made the wrong call. If I had it to do over again, if I could go back…”
    “We can never go back.” Cooper cut her off with a sharp, slashing hand gesture before turning and stalking down to the lake’s edge.
    Vivian watched him shove his hands into the pockets of his well-worn canvas jacket, her battered heart sinking to the pit of her stomach. She’d finally had the chance to apologize to Cooper, and it hadn’t made any difference.
    Not that she’d truly hoped it would—although she was appalled to discover there was a small, stubbornly optimistic part of her that had held out a slender thread of real hope.
    That part was crushed, now, trembling under the weight of the past and all her many bad decisions. Leaving Cooper at the altar had only been the first of many…but it was the one she regretted the most.
    ***
    “All you had to do was walk away from your parents,” Cooper said. He could feel her hovering behind him, but he kept his gaze on the placid surface of the misty lake. “But you walked away from me instead.”
    She took a few steps closer. “At the time, I didn’t think I had a choice. It was so ingrained, the need to obey my parents and follow their rules. To not rock the boat.”
    “You were already planning to rock the boat,” he pointed out. “You knew they’d hate it if you married me, that they’d never think a low class scholarship punk like me was good enough for their perfect debutante daughter.”
    Vivian paused at his side, her posture defeated. When she smiled, it was more of a grimace. “I had enough courage to go behind their backs—barely. But I didn’t have the guts to defy them to their faces.”
    “They’re your parents,” Cooper ground out. “They would have come around eventually.”
    She was quiet for a long moment, nothing but the gentle lap of water on the lakeshore filling the air.