Emily and River meet in Miami, where they have the time of their lives, but it isn't meant to be: the next morning, Emily leaves for San Francisco, leaving both their hearts broken. They don't think they'll ever see each other again.
Emily goes back...
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Gasps filled the room. No one seemed to know what to do in that moment. Everyone looked at each other, waiting for someone to tell them what to do, but no one dared to move—besides the press, of course, whose cameras were flashing faster than the speed of light in a thunderstorm.
Emily also didn't know what to do and just stood there, frozen, and wondered what she'd done wrong. She couldn't think of anything; she'd done everything according to plan, right?
Her wedding planner had told her to focus on the survivors-getting-married part in her vows, which she had. She hadn't complained about not having a choice in who she'd marry. When Jason had decided for her the business came before Emily and River, she hadn't said anything.
So what had gone wrong?
"What?" Emily whispered, more confused than she was offended.
Jason closed his eyes and his hand curled up into a fist, but not because he was angry; he had trouble trying to find the right words. "I... I can't do this," he said. "This is wrong in more ways than one."
She still didn't understand what he was getting at. Was he trying to cancel the wedding at the last minute? What about the damage he'd talked about? Canceling a wedding at the last minute would be bad press, he'd said, and it would make it seem like he was unpredictable and unreliable as a CEO-to-be. No one would want to be in business with him—it was how he convinced her they had to go through with it. Of all the times they could cancel it, today was the worst of all.
What had changed his mind?
"Jason," Jason's father, Malcolm, hissed. "What are you doing?"
Emily saw out of the corners of her eyes the press was enjoying this, but for her, everything started to dazzle. She found it hard to see straight and started breathing heavily, taking short breaths at a time.
"We better talk about this in private," Jason said, eyeing the cameras recording them. This would be a lot of bad publicity, they both knew that, and a lot of damage control would have to be done in order to fix the mess he'd made—the mess they'd made. Emily couldn't help but think she was part of the problem too.
She saw a girl with her brown hair in a ponytail whisper something to her colleague, who was typing on his phone. How long would it be before this was all over the internet? Everyone would know about it—if being humiliated during your own wedding wasn't already bad enough.
Malcolm and his wife stood up from their seats in the first row, just like Matthew and Brooke did. Jason held out his hand to Emily and she hooked her arm on his. This wasn't about falling in and out of love anymore; they were just saving face. Emily couldn't imagine what effect this would have on the companies that were already in bad weather. The wedding and the merger secured by marriage would have had to save them, but now she wasn't sure of anything anymore.
She did know a little bit about business as she was the daughter of the CEO of Abbington Aviation. Conversations at the dinner table about shares and finances and how hard the economic crisis had been on the company were often brought up at the dinner table. Her father quizzed her sometimes about what to do in a specific hypothetical situation—when an employee is exposed as a fraud, or when the CFO goes on maternity leave—and had always hoped she would be the one who followed in his footsteps. However, the kidnapping had come between him and his dream.
