Chapter One
High heels were the devil’s plaything. Arielle Becker was surer of this fact than her own name. Almost as sure as she was that she would never wear this ornate million-pound baby-blue gown ever again. She loved Bella, had lived with her for six years, and was honored to be a bridesmaid, but she was not cut out for the longevity and festivity of a Kellerman family event—certainly not in these shoes. Bella hadn’t even walked down the aisle yet, and Ari was considering tossing a match on the whole friendship if it meant she could just sit down.
“Stop fidgeting,” her best friend and other roommate, Liana Radinsky, hissed from where she stood next to her under the chuppah. “People are looking at us.”
“Lily’s walking down the aisle.” Ari tilted her chin in the direction of Bella’s stunning sister, the oldest of the seven-child Kellerman clan, and her equally stunning husband. “No one’s looking at us.”
A loud cough sounded from behind them—the kind that meant “shut up” rather than “there’s something stuck in my throat”—and she turned slightly to sneak a peek at the source.
Judah Klein was the wedding singer of the moment for Modern Orthodox weddings, a near-impossible get unless you had an in—like, say, your good friend and upstairs neighbor happened to be his younger brother. It didn’t hurt that he was relatively nice-looking in that immaculate, perfect-posture, always-wearing-a-meticulously-tailored-suit kind of way. But Ari was pretty sure she’d never seen him smile in his entire life—he probably wasn’t even capable—and right then, his dark blue eyes resembled nothing so much as polar ice caps.
She focused her attention back on Lily, whose perfectly manicured fingers were wrapped around a white rose bouquet identical to the one in Liana’s and Arielle’s hands. The chuppah was already crowded with the rest of the wedding party, and after Lily, there’d be four little nieces and nephews scrambling down the aisle with flower petals or whatever else little kids carried. Ari had no idea how Bella’s enormous marshmallow of a dress was going to fit in with it all, but it was hard to think about anything in these damn shoes.
She tried to rebalance her weight but ended up wobbling and elbowing Liana, who squeezed her arm. “I am going to gently murder you,” Liana warned her through gritted teeth.
Ari opened her mouth to respond, but she could feel the weight of the wedding singer’s stupid, judgmental gaze, waiting to visually eviscerate her for the crime of daring to speak under the chuppah. The irony was that were he a normal, decent human being, they might’ve been friendly; his brother, Akiva, was one of her closest friends and constantly invited Judah to parties and Shabbat meals. But Judah always declined, too busy with his own bustling social life and career to make any time for the little brother who, against all reason, seemed to worship him.
It was Akiva’s fault that Ari knew any of Judah’s music to begin with. He was Judah’s biggest fanboy, blasting his Chanukah album whenever possible, until Ari knew every note of every song. And yes, okay, Judah was inarguably talented as a singer, but as far as Ari could tell, he sucked as both a brother and an empathetic human.
Goddammit, her feet hurt.
Lily and her husband reached the chuppah, and Ari and Liana got shoved even farther to the back as the music changed to the Disneyfied ditty that would bring Bella’s nieces and nephews down the aisle. They crowded at the top, the picture of adorableness in poufy little dresses and miniature suits with satiny vests, while various family members enthusiastically encouraged them to walk as if they were fluffy-tailed show dogs. Ari squirmed in impatience, debating whether anyone would notice if she slipped out of her heels for just a minute. Everyone’s eyes were on the kids anyway, oohing and awwing and directing little Emmy not to eat the petals from her basket.
“I see what you’re thinking,” Liana whispered fiercely. “Don’t do it. Bella’s almost here. Just wait until she gets down the aisle.”
“Lee, I—”
Another cough. This time, Ari full-on turned to glare at Judah Klein. As if he’d know the pain of standing in heels for a fucking hour while every Kellerman in existence sashayed slowly down the aisle. It was easy to judge from his comfy, isolated spot by the mic, wearing a suit of his own choosing and flat shoes, and she wasn’t having it.
Better men had wilted from an Arielle Becker glare, but Judah simply returned it as if he were a kindergarten teacher used to dealing with insolent children. Meanwhile, Liana, an actual kindergarten teacher, remained totally oblivious, most likely daydreaming about her boyfriend, Gideon, and lamenting for the millionth time that he hadn’t passed the Kellermans’ strict “no ringy, no bringy” invite rule.
The music came to an end as the kids reached the chuppah and were quickly swept off to the side by their moms, and a reverent hush fell over the room as everyone stood to welcome the bride. Ari craned her neck and shifted to her other foot to get a good look, taking in the full picture—Bella with her long translucent veil covering her face, clutching a parent’s elbow on each side, her long beaded dress sweeping the floor. It was surreal, seeing Bella like this—the very Bella whose hair she’d held back after her bachelorette party just one week earlier. Surreal, and almost a little magical—
Crash. One of the flower girls barreled right into Ari just as she was shifting her weight again, and in an instant, she was losing her balance, reaching out for Liana’s arm as she stumbled backward. Or wait, that arm definitely did not belong to—
“Ow!” Judah cried out as Ari’s heel smashed the center of his foot, disturbing the awed hush in the room. The entire bridal party whipped around to look at him in horror as the crowd gasped at the interruption, and Judah’s face drained of all color when he realized what he’d done. His hands flew, frantically motioning for the band to start up the instrumental version of “Lecha Dodi” meant to bring Bella down the aisle, and Ari couldn’t help the tremendous snort-laugh that escaped her at Judah Klein completely losing his shit.
If he’d looked irritated at Ari before, the death glare he gave her now could strike her down on the spot faster than an eleventh plague.
“Sorry!” she hissed, earning herself another elbow in the side from Liana. Thankfully, Bella simply giggled and started down the aisle, but Judah did not look mollified. Still, he had no choice but to pull himself together when Bella and her enormous-skirted dress reached the chuppah. With the photographers’ lenses and the audience’s attention firmly on the couple, Ari slid out of her heels and exhaled a sigh of relief that was easily masked by Judah slipping into song as if nothing had ever happened.
His voice was aggravatingly beautiful for someone with such an obnoxious temperament, a perfectly controlled flow of honey that brought Liana to tears. But Liana had always been a sap, a heartfelt romantic whose unrelenting pursuit of happiness managed to land her the love of her life over the course of a single Chanukah. There was nothing in the world Liana Radinsky wanted more than to be standing under her own chuppah with Gideon Levy, Judah Klein singing her through the happiest moment of her life.
Ari could not relate.
She wasn’t a cynic, per se—she believed Bella and Zach would live happily ever after, and that whenever Gideon got his act together, he and Liana would too. And there was a brief time, maybe, when she’d thought her future could look like this, simply because getting married and having babies was what Modern Orthodox Jews did.
Half her friends had paired off in college, gotten married the summer after graduation, and promptly fallen off the face of the earth. The rest had either scattered around the country for grad school or, like her, moved in with friends on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. And for a while, it had been fun—there were always parties or loud Shabbos meals followed by gatherings in Central Park, and the continuing stream of weddings meant lots of free drinks followed by harmless hookups. But then even those friends started throwing themselves into the dating scene, actively seeking out the kind of social events and setups that comprised Ari’s nightmares, and suddenly they were nearing thirty and it felt like everyone was growing up without her.
Wife was a hefty word to Arielle. Maybe it was because she hadn’t seen her mother in that role since her father’s untimely passing twenty years earlier, or because her older sister, Dana—whom she’d been sure would become her shining example of wifeliness—had settled for living with her asshole boyfriend instead, to the horror of literally everyone who’d ever known her. Or maybe she simply wasn’t built that way; she certainly felt like the only one of her friends who barely knew how to cook, had never changed a diaper, and was utterly freaked out by the idea of a single person being her entire future.
All she knew was that, much like the hideous baby-blue gown she was sporting, it wasn’t a natural fit, and it didn’t feel like it had a whole lot of give either.
And yet, Bella was becoming a wife right in front of her eyes while Liana squeezed Ari’s hand as if it were the only thing keeping her from tumbling into the Grand Canyon. Between her grip and Judah’s annoyingly beautiful voice, the whole thing was a sensory overload. Ari closed her eyes, imagining she was in her happy place of doing a Lego set in her apartment with a can of moscato at her side and Bella and Liana watching some ridiculous reality show in the background.
Of course, when she opened them, she was still there, squished and sweaty and standing next to one of Bella’s giggling nieces.
“Look, Mommy!” the little girl called out, interrupting the rabbi’s reading of the ketubah as she held up her little foot … wearing a much bigger, very familiar shoe. “I’m Cindawewwa!”
Oh God. Ari cringed as everyone turned to look at the flower girl, Lily trying to shush her while the rabbi searched for the source of the commotion and Bella’s baby sister Goldie practically yelled, “Whose shoe is that?” Even Bella had a look of puzzlement on her face, which made Ari want to sink into the floor.
Instead, she made the mistake of catching the eye of none other than Judah Klein and learned she’d been wrong about one thing.
He was capable of smiling.
* * *
“This is such a beautiful wedding,” Liana said, sighing for what must have been the millionth time, and Ari forced herself to keep her eyeballs in locked position. The wedding had quickly shifted out of train wreck territory without Ari having to out herself as the bridesmaid who’d smashed the wedding singer’s foot and taken her shoes off during the ceremony, but she was still firmly in Misery Mode, and Liana’s matrimonial obsessing wasn’t helping.
She felt for her best friend; Liana and Gideon unquestionably loved each other, but they seemed to be moving toward the chuppah at very different speeds. She was impatient to move in together, get boning, and start having babies, while he had already done the cohabitation thing with an ex before reconnecting with Judaism and becoming observant, and was intent on taking his sweet time. But it was like a switch had flipped in Liana once she and Gideon had hit the six-month mark, and now she had marriage on the brain. All. The damn. Time.
Copyright © 2026 by Dahlia Adler