The next day, after I was discharged, Ryan sat beside me at home while we replayed the moment in our heads over and over.
I couldn’t stop thinking about the way she smiled, how deliberate her movements had been. It wasn’t an accident. I knew it.
So did Ryan. But knowing and proving it were two very different things. Until Mia sent us the video.
One of our guests had been livestreaming part of the reception to their family out of state. They’d caught everything: the push, the smirk, and the moment before I hit the water. It was all there.
I watched it once. That was enough. Ryan, though, watched it at least 10 times.
When he turned to me, he looked like a different man. “We’re pressing charges,” he said. “I’m not letting her get away with this.”
What followed was one of the hardest seasons of my life.
The legal process was slow, frustrating, and exhausting. Vivian’s attorney tried every trick in the book. At first, she claimed she had tripped.
Then she said I was standing too close to the edge. Later, her story changed again: she’d only meant to “gesture playfully.”
Ryan and I kept our distance. She sent flowers, letters, even a package with an expensive silk robe and a note that read, “Let’s not ruin the family over a misunderstanding.” I didn’t open anything else after that.
Social media made things worse. Vivian went online to post some carefully crafted statements. She posed about how her daughter-in-law was “vindictive” and “exaggerating” what was “clearly an accident.” Vivian painted herself as an aging and “misunderstood” mother in distress, terrified she’d be separated from her only child.
Her lies didn’t matter once we got to court, a process that took months. We filed charges for assault and destruction of medical property, which she purposefully destroyed on my wedding day. When the video played in front of the judge, there was no more spinning the truth.
You could see her face, the intentional shove, and the moment she stepped back as I fell, not forward to help. Even the slight curve of her lips was visible.
