Part 1: A Ceremony Built for Someone Else’s Comfort
My Husband Left Our Wedding Night to Comfort His “Best Friend” — And Came Back With Her. On the night he became my husband, he left me alone in a hotel suite and returned hours later with Lauren wearing his jacket. In that moment, I realized the woman I had been competing with was never really in the past.
Guests kept telling us afterward that the whole ceremony looked pulled straight from a bridal catalog.
Roses wound up a wooden arch, string lights caught the champagne glasses, and the old Savannah ballroom seemed dipped in gold.
My mother started crying before I had even taken my first step down the aisle, and my father gripped my fingers so hard his ring dug into my skin.
Mark waited at the front in his navy suit, eyes already red before the first note played.
The second he spotted me, he covered his mouth with both hands, like the sight had knocked the air out of him.
The crowd let out that hushed, collective sigh people give when they think they’re watching something rare.
For a few minutes, I let myself believe them.
I told myself every restless night, every awkward talk, every worry I had buried over three years had all been leading somewhere worth reaching.
The knot in my stomach, I decided, was just nerves and nothing more.
His vows were the kind people remember for years.
He promised to pick me first no matter the season, to guard our calm, to give me a home where love was never in question.
When his voice cracked on the words “You are my best friend,” the whole room seemed to soften around us.
I smiled the way brides are supposed to smile.
Still, that phrase sat wrong with me, because Mark already had a best friend, and her name was Lauren.
She sat in the second row that afternoon in a pale blue satin dress that shimmered nearly silver under the setting sun.
She wasn’t part of the bridal party, though Mark had brought it up twice, and both times I had turned him down, gently at first, then firmly.
Some boundaries need to exist even when everyone else acts like they don’t notice them.
She clapped hard when we kissed, wiped her eyes as we walked back down the aisle, and hugged Mark far longer than anyone else during cocktail hour.
When she finally let go, her palm lingered flat on his chest, and my cousin Natalie caught my eye from clear across the room.
I acted like I hadn’t seen a thing.
By then, looking away had become second nature, almost like ignoring Lauren was its own quiet skill I’d perfected.
For three years, Mark had insisted she was simply a friend, someone he’d known since their days at school in North Carolina.
They’d survived breakups side by side, hauled boxes for each other’s moves, and once shared rent on a two-bedroom place when neither had much money.
He called it family, not romance, and told me I read too much into their history whenever I asked questions.
I wanted so badly to be easygoing about it, to seem secure and modern, to trust that a man and woman could stay close with nothing tangled underneath.
So when she rang him at midnight during a panic attack, I stayed quiet.
When her tire blew out along I-40 in the middle of our anniversary dinner, I told him to go.
When a breakup left her sobbing and he sat with her at her apartment until two in the morning, I stayed home folding towels, telling myself love shouldn’t come with strings attached.
But standing there in my dress that afternoon, I thought I had finally closed that chapter.
I didn’t feel like I’d won Mark, exactly, more like I’d earned the right to stop measuring myself against someone who wasn’t even mine to compete with.
I believed the vows had drawn a line I could finally stand on the right side of.
At the reception, the dancing never stopped.
My brother stood up and joked about the printed scorecards I used to hand out at family game night, and Mark’s father teased that his son had finally found a woman patient enough to survive fantasy football season with him.
Everyone laughed, ate cake, and swore the night couldn’t have gone better.
Lauren didn’t give a speech, but she found ways to stay close anyway.
She slid into photos, looped her arm through Mark’s when the photographer called for “college friends,” and leaned in to whisper something during dinner that made him shut his eyes like the words physically hurt.
When I asked what she’d said, he brushed it off, calling her emotional and nothing more.
“Emotional because we’re getting married?” I pushed.
He looked at me like I’d knocked a wine glass off the table in front of everyone.
“Don’t start that tonight,” he said.
So I let it go, swallowing the question down with champagne while Aunt Carol, freshly flown in from Ohio, kept repeating that she’d never seen a prettier bride.
I told myself tomorrow Lauren would fly back to Atlanta and we’d be boarding a plane to Maui, just the two of us finally.
At 10:47 p.m., we made our exit through a corridor of sparklers while the photographer shouted for one more kiss.
Mark dipped me so theatrically the crowd erupted, and for one dizzy second his champagne and frosting kiss made every doubt feel foolish.
Our suite sat on the top floor with a view of the river.
Someone had sent chocolate covered strawberries, and my maid of honor left prosecco with a card reading, “Finally, Mrs. Bennett!”
It took nearly ten minutes just to unbutton my dress, Mark laughing the whole time as his fingers fumbled clumsily.
Then his phone rang.
The clock read 11:26 p.m.
His face changed the instant he saw the screen, before he even said a word.
I already knew exactly who was calling.
Part 2: What the Phone Kept Interrupting
Mark stepped back with the phone still in his hand, wedding band gleaming, that half smile from our exit still lingering on his face.
The screen’s glow made him look somehow younger and guiltier at once, and though he hesitated, he didn’t decline the call either.
“Is that Lauren?” I asked.
He rubbed the back of his neck. “This is her second call.”
I stood there in a silk robe, tiny pearls still pinned in my hair, my dress draped over a chair by the window.
The room smelled of roses, hairspray, and pricey candles, the kind of setting that should have opened a honeymoon, not repeated a scene I already knew far too well.
“What’s going on with her?” I asked.
“I haven’t asked yet.”
“Then don’t answer.”
He looked at me like I’d told him to walk away from a house fire. “Amelia, come on.”
Amelia Grace Whitman, technically Amelia Bennett as of a few hours earlier, though the new surname suddenly felt borrowed, like a coat that didn’t fit right.
I folded my arms while he picked up the call and turned toward the window, dropping his voice low.
I caught pieces, not everything: “Hey, slow down… Where are you… don’t drive like this… breathe, Lauren.”
My throat tightened watching my own reflection in the dark glass, careful makeup, soft curls, my grandmother’s earrings from 1968 sparkling in the low light.
I looked every bit like a woman who had just married the person she loved most.
But something inside me sat down, tired and old, waiting.
When he hung up, his expression carried the look he always wore right before asking forgiveness for something he intended to do anyway.
“She’s locked herself in the lobby bathroom,” he said. “Panic attack. Her mother said something awful during the reception, and she can’t catch her breath.”
I waited for him to mention calling her sister, her cousin, a rideshare, anyone else breathing in the state of Georgia.
Instead he reached for his jacket on the chair.
“Mark,” I said.
“Twenty minutes, that’s it.”
“No.”
He stopped moving completely.
Such a tiny word, but it cracked through the room like something shattering.
“No, what does that mean?” he asked.
“It means no. Not on our wedding night.”
“She’s having a panic attack, Amelia.”
“And I just became your wife.”
The word wife landed heavier than I expected, something I’d imagined saying while ordering room service, never like a rope stretched over a canyon.
He exhaled hard. “This is exactly why I kept quiet about this stuff.”
“Because you knew it was wrong?”
“Because you’d make it about yourself.”
I laughed, though there was no humor in it. “My husband leaving our suite before midnight to comfort another woman is definitely about me, Mark.”
“She’s not just another woman. This is Lauren.”
“That’s exactly the issue.”
His jaw locked. “You’ve never gotten our friendship.”
“I understand it better than you’d like.”
He glanced toward the door, torn in a way that told me everything I needed to know.
A man who just promised to choose someone forever shouldn’t need a full minute to decide.
I sat on the bed because my legs felt unsteady. “If you walk out that door right now, something between us shifts permanently.”
“That’s not fair,” he said.
“Neither is this.”
“She needs me.”
“So did I, tonight.”
He flinched, though not nearly enough, sliding his jacket on anyway. “I’ll be right back.”
The door clicked shut softly behind him.
That quiet click somehow drowned out the entire reception in my memory.
For a while I sat frozen in the middle of that honeymoon suite, city lights blinking outside, strawberries slowly going soft on their tray.
Somewhere below, guests were still riding elevators home, makeup smudged, shoes dangling from their fingers.
I scrolled through photos on my phone instead, Mark crying at the altar, my nieces tossing petals, my mother cupping my face in both hands.
Under a picture from our first dance, my aunt had commented, “This is what true love looks like.”
I read that line until the words blurred together completely.
By 11:58 p.m. he texted that things were worse than expected, that he was taking her outside for air.
By 12:19 a.m. came a message begging me not to be mad.
By 12:46 a.m. he wrote that she didn’t want to be left alone right now.
I didn’t answer a single one.
At 1:12 a.m. I pulled the pins from my hair one at a time and lined them along the nightstand.
By 1:35 I’d washed off my makeup, watching mascara bleed down the sink like gray rainwater.
At 2:03 I dug through my bag and changed into sweatpants.
Then at 2:27 a.m., a knock hit the door.
I didn’t move right away.
Part of me hoped it was housekeeping, or my maid of honor, or a stranger who’d wandered to the wrong floor.
Then Mark’s voice came through. “Amelia, open the door.”
I opened it.
He wasn’t alone.
Lauren stood beside him, wrapped in his jacket.
Part 3: The Question She Answered Without Meaning To
Lauren looked smaller standing there than she had earlier that day, though not so fragile that I forgot she was outside my hotel suite at 2:30 in the morning.
Her hair hung loose, mascara smudged faintly beneath her eyes, and Mark’s jacket, the very one he’d worn while promising to be my husband, swallowed her arms whole.
I looked straight at him. “Why is she here?”
He stepped closer, using his tone like it might soothe me. “She couldn’t sit alone in her room with her mother right there. They got into it again.”
“So you walked her into ours?”
“Just for a minute.”
Lauren’s eyes filled up. “I’m so sorry, Amelia. I never wanted to wreck anything.”
I wanted to be gracious about it, genuinely.
I understood panic attacks were real, and families could be brutally unkind in ways strangers never see.
But this wasn’t the first crisis that had somehow made Mark the center of Lauren’s entire world.
“You haven’t wrecked anything,” I said. “Mark made this decision himself.”
“Not right now,” he warned.
“Then when?” I asked. “Tomorrow, on our flight, in Maui, on our first anniversary?”
Lauren clutched the jacket tighter. “I can leave.”
Mark turned toward her instantly. “No, stay. Not like this.”
Watching the back of his head in that moment, something inside me finally stopped begging.
It didn’t shatter exactly, it settled, quiet and deliberate, like a decision already made.
“Mark,” I said, “look at me.”
He did.
“Have you ever been in love with her?”
His color drained.
“Amelia,” Lauren started.
“No,” I said, eyes locked on him. “I’m asking my husband.”
He swallowed hard. “Not really, not like that.”
It was the kind of answer built to sound truthful while leaving the back door wide open.
“That’s not a no,” I told him.
He dragged his hand through his hair. “There were feelings, years ago, back in college. It was messy. Nothing happened, though.”
Lauren shut her eyes.
I nearly laughed at that phrase, nothing happened, the same three words that had sent countless marriages straight into divorce court.
Nothing happened still meant something had lived quietly in that room for years, whether or not anyone dared name it.
“Did you tell me any of this before tonight?” I asked.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I figured it stopped mattering.”
“It mattered enough for you to bury it.”
His face twisted. “I didn’t want you blowing it up bigger than it was.”
I turned to Lauren. “And you? Did you still feel something for him?”
She sobbed harder, but I couldn’t afford to soften anymore.
Not because I hated her, but because tears and honesty aren’t the same currency, and I was tired of confusing the two.
“I honestly didn’t know what I felt,” she said.
“That’s not a no either.”
Mark shifted slightly, placing himself between us. “Stop grilling her.”
That instinct came out fast, protective, and it wrecked me completely.
He’d positioned himself in front of Lauren the exact way a husband should stand in front of his own wife.
“Do you understand what you just did?” I asked.
He blinked. “What?”
“You stood between us, like I was the danger here.”
For the first time all night, real shame crossed his face, arriving far too late to fix anything, though I noticed it anyway.
I’d spent years collecting little scraps of awareness from him and calling them progress.
Lauren dropped into the armchair by the window while Mark knelt beside her with a glass of water from the minibar.
I stood near the bed in my sweatpants, watching my wedding night twist into something no bride should ever have to witness firsthand.
Then Lauren said something I will carry for the rest of my life.
“I almost didn’t come today.”
Mark’s head snapped up. “Lauren, don’t.”
She shook her head, still crying. “No, she deserves the truth.”
My whole body went cold. “What truth?”
She stared at the carpet. “Last month I told Mark that watching him marry you felt harder than I expected.”
Silence swallowed the room whole.
Mark stood abruptly. “That was between us.”
Between us. Not wrong. Not out of line. Just private.
“Last month?” I repeated.
He said nothing.
“While I was confirming the seating chart, paying the florist, writing vows, she was telling you this was hard for her?”
“It wasn’t like that.”
“Did she ask you not to marry me?”
Lauren buried her face in her hands.
Mark’s silence spoke before he could.
“She was upset,” he finally said. “She didn’t mean it that way.”
I sat down as the room tilted beneath me, my hands strangely steady despite everything.
Maybe shock this deep just goes quiet instead of loud.
“What did you tell her back?” I asked.
His eyes pleaded with mine. “I told her I loved you.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
He pressed his palm to his forehead. “I told her I couldn’t lose her.”
There it was.
Not “I told her to respect my marriage.” Not “I told her we needed distance.” Not “I told her my future with you comes first.”
I couldn’t lose her.
I thought back to every time I’d been labeled jealous, every apology I gave for questioning why Lauren always knew things before I did.
Every time Mark had told me I was making it weird while quietly feeding the very thing that made it weird in the first place.
I walked to the closet and dragged my suitcase onto the rack.
Mark stared. “What are you doing?”
“Packing.”
“Amelia, don’t make a scene.”
That word hit the room like glass breaking.
Dramatic, or something close enough to sting the same.
I turned slowly. “You brought the woman who begged you not to marry me straight into our honeymoon suite, and I’m the one being dramatic?”
He had nothing to say to that.
I folded jeans, shirts, my makeup bag, and the sandals I’d packed for Maui, my hands moving with a strange precision, almost like packing for a stranger.
Lauren cried quietly in her chair while Mark stood frozen between us, helpless for the very first time that night.
Once the suitcase zipped shut, he finally stepped forward. “Where are you even going?”
“Natalie’s room.”
“You can’t just walk out.”
“Watch me.”
“We’re married now.”
I glanced down at the ring, two carats, oval cut, exactly the one I’d once pinned on a mood board months before.
It suddenly felt like something plastic.
“We had a wedding,” I told him. “I’m no longer sure we have a marriage.”
Part 4: Daylight, and All the Logistics That Followed
Natalie opened her door in an oversized University of Georgia sweatshirt with one false eyelash still clinging on.
One glance at my face, then the suitcase, was all it took for her to step aside without a single question.
That’s usually how you know someone truly loves you.
I sat on the edge of her bed while she brewed terrible hotel coffee from a tiny machine near the sink.
It tasted burnt and bitter, but I drank it anyway, mostly because holding the cup gave my hands something to do.
When I finally told her the whole story, she stayed calm until I reached the part about the jacket.
“Absolutely not,” Natalie said flatly.
Those three words did more for me than any greeting card ever could.
By 6:15 a.m., my mother called, since apparently Mark had already reached out to my father.
I hadn’t slept, and clearly neither had he, judging by the messages arriving every twenty minutes, cycling through apology, explanation, frustration, and guilt.
The last one read, “Please don’t tell everyone before we talk,” and that line bothered me more than anything else he’d sent.
Not “Are you okay?” Not “I understand why you left.” Not “I’m sorry I humiliated you in front of everyone.”
Just, please don’t tell everyone.
My mother’s voice shook slightly when I finally answered. “Honey, Mark called your father.”
Of course he had.
“What exactly did he say?” I asked.
“That there was some misunderstanding with Lauren and you got upset.”
Natalie mouthed the word “wow” from across the room.
I closed my eyes. “Mom, he left me completely alone on our wedding night to console her. Then he brought her back to our suite at two-thirty in the morning.”
My mother went quiet in a way that genuinely scared me.
Then, softly, she asked, “Do you want us to come get you?”
That question nearly broke me, not because I needed rescuing, but because she never once asked me to calm down or think of the guests first.
By 8:00 a.m., the whole fairy tale had shrunk into logistics.
My father canceled the brunch slideshow entirely, Natalie called the airline about my Maui ticket, and my brother went back to retrieve my dress since I couldn’t stand to walk into that suite again.
Mark waited downstairs by the marble fountain, still wearing yesterday’s rumpled shirt, looking exhausted and ashamed in a way that might have worked on me once.
But after a night like that, love starts demanding proof instead of promises.
“Can we talk alone?” he asked.
Natalie crossed her arms. “Whatever you say to her, you say with me ten feet away.”
I touched her arm gently. “It’s fine.”
She clearly hated it but walked off, watching him like a security camera wearing lip gloss.
We ended up in a quiet corner near the gift shop, surrounded by strangers buying postcards, bottled water, and pralines, as if my entire life hadn’t just cracked open overnight.
“I messed everything up,” he said.
I waited.
“I should’ve handled that so differently.”
“Sounds like something your father coached you to say.”
His eyes flashed. “That’s not fair.”
“Don’t use fair with me right now.”
He looked down. “I panicked, I’m sorry.”
“No, Lauren panicked. You made the choice.”
He nodded slowly, like the difference had finally landed. “I never physically cheated on you.”
I actually believed that part.
That was the cruel piece of it, since I never pictured Mark and Lauren sneaking around motels or trading secret messages.
What they’d built was messier and easier to deny, a private emotional world where I was somehow the rude one for noticing its borders.
“I know that,” I said.
Relief flickered across his face.
“That doesn’t make you faithful.”
The relief disappeared instantly.
I slipped off my ring and set it on the small table between us, barely making a sound, though he stared at it like I’d hurled it across the room.
“Amelia, please,” he said, his face crumbling.
“What did you think marriage would actually fix?” I asked.
“I thought you’d finally feel secure.”
“No,” I said. “You thought I’d stop being able to leave.”
His eyes welled up, and maybe that counted as the most honest thing said all morning.
He didn’t argue back, didn’t defend himself, just sat there absorbing what he’d done.
“I love you,” he said.
“I know you do.”
“Then why does this feel like the end of everything?”
“Because love isn’t the same thing as safety.”
He wiped his face with both hands. “Just tell me what to do.”
Old me would have answered instantly, told him to cut Lauren off, start counseling, prove himself, and handed him a roadmap back to my heart.
But the woman sitting there had packed a suitcase at three in the morning while another woman cried in her honeymoon suite.
“I’m not handing you a script for respecting me,” I said.
He looked devastated by that.
Part of me felt awful for the small satisfaction that gave me.
That afternoon my parents drove me home to Atlanta in my father’s truck, my wedding dress lying silent in its garment bag across the back seat like some kind of witness.
My mother held my hand nearly the whole four-hour drive, only letting go for gas and water outside Macon.
By the time we reached my apartment, my phone showed 68 unread messages.
Relatives asking if I was okay, friends who’d already heard three different versions of events, and three separate messages from Lauren herself.
I read hers last.
“Amelia, I’m so sorry, I never meant to hurt you.”
Then, minutes later, “Mark’s blaming everything on me now.”
Then finally, “I think we should talk, woman to woman.”
I stared at that phrase until my pulse pounded behind my teeth.
Woman to woman, as if we were coworkers untangling a scheduling conflict, as if she hadn’t spent years accepting pieces of my fiancé that should have belonged only to me.
As if my wedding night had simply been a misunderstanding between two reasonable adults.
I typed one line back.
“Do not contact me again.”
Then I blocked her completely.
Part 5: What Was Left Standing Once the Dust Cleared
That first week afterward felt like the strangest stretch of my whole life.
Flowers kept showing up from people who had no idea what happened, their cards full of congratulations and cheerful newlywed jokes, until my kitchen counter looked like a funeral home pretending to be a garden.
Mark moved back in with his parents in Marietta, calling, texting, emailing, and once even sliding a handwritten letter under my door.
I left it unread for two days, terrified it might sound like the man I still missed.
When I finally opened it, it did exactly that.
He wrote about our very first date at that taco place in Decatur, where he spilled salsa down his shirt, and about the time we got snowed in near Asheville watching old films for two straight days.
He admitted he’d been selfish, cowardly, and, in his own words, addicted to being needed.
That phrase stopped me cold.
Addicted to being needed was the closest he’d ever come to an unpolished truth.
He explained that Lauren made him feel important in a way he hadn’t realized he leaned on, while I made him feel calm, and because calm never came with emergencies, he’d mistaken it for something less urgent.
He said he wanted counseling, boundaries, anything at all to fix it.
For one dangerous minute, I almost picked up the phone.
Instead, I called a therapist.
Her name was Dr. Harris, her office tucked behind a Methodist church, silver curls and green glasses framing the calmest voice I think I’ve ever heard.
During our first session, I told her everything from the beginning and apologized three separate times for rambling.
She simply said, “You don’t need to make your pain convenient for me.”
I cried until my head throbbed.
Over the following month, I discovered heartbreak could be dramatic one hour and mundane the next.
Some mornings I sobbed on the bathroom tile, other mornings I compared insurance plans and thawed chicken from the freezer like nothing had happened at all.
Life didn’t pause politely just because I’d been betrayed.
Rent stayed due, the car still needed an oil change, the dentist still called to confirm appointments.
Mark and I sat through two sessions with a counselor before I made my final decision.
He got a lot right in those rooms, admitting Lauren had crossed lines, admitting he’d fed her dependence, admitting he’d downplayed my feelings because facing them meant he’d have to actually change.
Still, one question stuck with me that I couldn’t shake loose.
Not whether he loved me, because I believed that part completely.
Not whether he’d cheated, since the answer depended entirely on how a person defined the word, and I’d grown tired of building a legal case out of my own hurt.
The real question was simpler and far scarier.
If Lauren called him again in the dead of night, would he still feel responsible for saving her?
When I finally asked him outright, he looked down at his hands.
That silence answered everything.
Two months after the wedding, I filed the paperwork to end the marriage.
It wasn’t cinematic the way people imagine, just forms, fees, waiting periods, and quiet conversations in a parking lot outside an attorney’s office that left my chest aching.
Nobody threw a drink, nobody screamed in a hallway, and there was no dramatic scene where Lauren confessed a scheme and Mark suddenly realized I’d been the one all along.
Real life almost never gives you a tidy ending like that.
According to a mutual friend I never actually asked for updates from, Lauren eventually relocated to Charlotte.
Mark sent one last email hoping I’d remember the good parts someday, and I did remember them, which somehow made leaving harder rather than easier.
That’s something people rarely explain about heartbreak.
You can still love someone and walk away, missing them completely while knowing your body finally rests easier without them nearby.
Six months later, I flew back to Savannah, alone this time.
It wasn’t some planned healing pilgrimage, since I’d grown wary of anything marketed as healing, but my job had a conference there, and avoiding an entire city felt like handing my worst night too much power over me.
I booked a plain room three blocks from the river, nowhere close to the hotel where I’d been married.
On the second evening, I passed a small park just as the sky began to shift colors.
A street musician strummed near a fountain while tourists wandered by with lemonade cups and shopping bags, the sky turning that same peach and lavender it had worn on my wedding day.
For a second my whole body remembered it all, the roses, the vows, the door clicking shut, the jacket around Lauren’s shoulders.
Then, just as quickly, the feeling passed.
I sat on a bench and watched the light fade behind the oak trees, thinking about the woman I used to be, the one so afraid of seeming jealous that she stopped asking whether she even felt respected.
I wanted to reach back and tell her that suspicion isn’t always insecurity.
Sometimes it’s just self respect, knocking quietly from somewhere inside.
A couple strolled past holding hands, laughing about dinner plans, the woman in a white sundress, the man carrying her heels in one hand.
I braced for bitterness, but it never came.
What I felt instead was quiet.
That quiet was new, and I welcomed it.
My phone buzzed with a text from Natalie.
“Conference done yet? Want me to fake-call and rescue you from small talk?”
I smiled and typed back, “Actually, I’m doing okay.”
And for once, I really was.
Not fixed completely, not forever settled, but under that Georgia sunset that no longer belonged to my wedding day, I felt steady.
A year on, people still occasionally asked what happened between us.
Some asked gently, others let curiosity dress itself up as concern, but eventually I learned to answer without spilling everything open each time.
“He wasn’t ready for marriage,” I’d say, “and I finally got ready to choose myself instead.”
That answer worked fine for dinner parties, and it was honest enough for me too.
The longer truth is that I didn’t leave simply because my husband comforted a friend that night.
I left because on our very first night as a married couple, he showed me exactly where I stood in the order of his loyalties, and because I’d spent years shrinking my own discomfort just so he wouldn’t have to grow up.
More than anything, I left because the question that scared me most had already answered itself before I ever had to ask it out loud.
Was I the woman he truly chose, or just the one who made his life appear stable while some part of his heart stayed available elsewhere?
By the time midnight passed on our wedding night, I already knew the answer.
By morning, I finally chose myself instead.
Names have been changed and this story has been dramatized for entertainment purposes.
