The Day He Called Off Our Engagement, I Bought Iceland Tickets Novel – Chapter 1 When I canceled the five-thousand-dollar wedding photo package, the consultant at the studio froze. “Ms. Hayes, the deposit is nonrefundable. Are you sure you don’t want to wait until your fiancé gets back from his business trip and discuss it with him?” I pushed the receipt across the counter and said softly, “There’s no need. He’s busy watching the northern lights in Iceland with his childhood sweetheart.” Michael Whitmore and I had been together for eight years. During those eight years, I had told him countless times that I wanted to take our wedding photos beneath the northern lights in Iceland. Every time, he would frown and say, “It’s far and expensive. Don’t waste money on that kind of flashy nonsense.
A wedding photography studio can just Photoshop in the northern lights afterward. It’s basically the same.” Then, last night, I found a couple’s account with more than a million followers on his old computer. For eight full years, there had been hundreds of posts, and every single one was about him traveling around the world with his childhood sweetheart. They even went to Iceland every year to take an anniversary photo beneath the northern lights. So it turned out he did understand romance. He just never wanted to give any of it to me. When the refund came through, I stared at the wedding dress in the display window, the one I had tried on three times, and broke down sobbing. The manager handed me a tissue and asked carefully, “We really can’t refund the deposit. Would you like to switch to an on-location package instead?” I shook my head. “No, thank you.” I had already bought a plane ticket to Southern Europe, leaving in three days.
If the moon would never come to me, then I would go chase my own sun. *** The moment I walked out of the wedding photography studio, my mom called. “Lily, your dad and I have been talking. We’re thinking of selling the old house back home, putting together some extra money, and helping you and Michael with a down payment in New York City.” “If you don’t have a place of your own and his family mistreats you after you marry him, you won’t even have anywhere to go.” The sound of my parents’ voices made my nose sting. “Mom, don’t. I’m not going to marry Michael.” The other end of the line went quiet. Then my dad took the phone and asked, “Did he mistreat you? Or does his family look down on us because we’re poor and not from New York?” My parents had always felt sorry for everything I had endured in this city.
If I had not been so determined to be with Michael back then, they never would have agreed to this marriage. “No, Dad.” I tilted my head back and forced my tears not to fall. “I accepted an overseas design project. I’ll be gone for three years, and the pay is really good. When I come back, I’ll buy a house with a garden back home. I won’t keep making myself miserable here.” I lied to them and spent a long time calming them down before they finally stopped pressing me. After I hung up, a notification from that couple’s account appeared at the top of my screen. In the photo, their fingers were interlaced, with the breathtaking northern lights of Iceland behind them. The caption read, [Eight years in, with the northern lights as our witness, we’re still each other’s one and only.]