My Family Locked Me Away For My ‘Imaginary’ Friend — Until He Crashed My Wedding

Part 1

I stood at the back of the church, shivering in a thin white dress while two hundred pairs of pitying eyes tracked my every movement.

My father’s grip on my elbow felt less like an escort and more like a warden marching an inmate to the gallows.

Nobody in their right mind wanted to be sitting in cold pews witnessing the marriage of a thirty-two-year-old spinster on Christmas Eve.

They had braved the blizzard outside out of sheer curiosity.

Everyone in our small town knew about the missing years of my youth.

My mother had tried her hardest to keep the clinical details quiet, inventing stories about a prestigious boarding school.

They still knew I was the odd one, the broken girl, the local cuckoo who had lost her mind.

“You look beautiful,” my mother whispered to me in the vestibule moments ago.

She reached out to smooth down a flyaway strand of my hair.

Her darting eyes and tight smile told me what she meant was that I finally looked normal.

Normal was the singular currency my family dealt in.

It was the reason I was about to bind myself for life to Craig.

Craig was an accountant whose favorite topic of conversation was his daily commute.

I felt nothing for him, and his mild smiles made my stomach turn.

But Craig was safe, and marrying him was the final exam I had to pass to prove my sanity.

A sharp winter draft sliced through the thin gauze of my sleeves, raising painful goosebumps along my arms.

I tried to take a step forward, but the soles of my shoes felt permanently cemented to the ancient stone floor.

“Breathe, Megan,” my father murmured, his tone gentler than I had heard in years.

“Just breathe and keep moving.”

I obeyed without a word, because blind obedience was the only survival skill I had mastered in that white-walled facility.

Placing one foot in front of the other, I forced myself down the long aisle.

The organist played the traditional wedding march with a tempo that sounded like a funeral dirge.

I kept my gaze locked on the floor, grateful for the thick lace veil masking my face.

It allowed the guests to assume I was overcome with bridal emotion rather than drowning in humiliation.

As we passed the fifth row, I spotted my aunt wiping at her eyes with an embroidered handkerchief.

“I am just so relieved she found someone grounded enough to take her on,” she whispered to her husband.

I ground my teeth together so hard my jaw began to ache in protest.

Looking past her, I watched the heavy snowflakes swirling against the tall stained-glass windows.

Snow used to be my favorite thing in the world, back when magic still seemed possible.

When I was twelve years old, I had sworn a blood oath to a boy who lived in a land untouched by reality.

He was a towering young king with eyes like winter ice, and he had promised to return for me when I came of age.

I had held onto my belief with desperation, speaking my truth to anyone who would listen.

My punishment for that stubborn loyalty was a locked room with barred windows and the burning scent of bleach.

For years, cold-eyed doctors prodded my mind, demanding I renounce the boy from the winter woods.

I screamed until my throat bled, waiting every night for him to kick down the doors and save me.

He never came.

Eventually, the endless stream of sedatives and isolation wore down my resistance.

I learned to bury my deepest memories in a mental vault, nodding when they told me my king was a symptom of psychosis.

Playing the part of the cured, compliant daughter was my only ticket out of that sterile hell.

Now, twenty years after I had made a childish vow to a phantom, I was sealing my fate to a stranger.

We reached the altar, the scent of white lilies making me lightheaded.

My father placed my hand into Craig’s clammy palm.

His shoulders dropped an inch, shedding the burden of raising a defective child.

Craig offered me a tight smile, his thumbs rubbing the knuckles of my gloved hand.

He looked more like a man preparing to sign a risky mortgage rather than a groom looking at his bride.

The priest cleared his throat, adjusting his wire-rimmed spectacles as he opened a leather-bound book.

Silence fell over the congregation, thick as a wool blanket.

Once I said those two little words, the dreaming girl inside me would be dead and buried.

I closed my eyes beneath the veil, letting out a ragged breath I felt like I had been holding for two decades.

It was time to accept that magic did not exist, and that no one was ever coming to rescue me.

The priest opened his mouth to begin, but the heavy oak doors at the back of the church splintered outward with a deafening crack.