Everyone came forward to greet them.
One by one.
Faces blurred into polite smiles, rehearsed congratulations, champagne glasses raised in celebration. Diana, Derek, Amelia, even Camilla each offering warm words, admiration, envy carefully hidden behind elegance. Raya responded to all of them with grace, her lips curved into the perfect smile expected of a newlywed bride.
She smiled so much her cheeks began to ache.
It's takes so much to act like you're happy on behalf of someone else.
At some point, Adrian was no longer beside her.
She noticed it only after a while.
One moment, his presence lingered near, cold, authoritative, suffocating in the way it always was. The next, he was gone, vanished into the crowd, wandering off somewhere Raya neither knew nor cared to ask about.
Good riddance, she thought.
