A bride-to-be whose partner dumped her as she stood in her veil an hour before their wedding has written a letter detailing her heartbreak.
Cyndi Maisonneuve says she was "blindsided" when her fiancée broke things off as the wedding guests waited on a beach in Hawaii where the ceremony was due to take place.
In her letter to the Guardian, Cyndi says: "He came into the room and said we needed to talk alone.
"He was crying.
"I assumed he was letting the emotion of the day get to him.
"Then he said it. 'I don't think I can do this.'
"I stood there – with the veil already in my hair.
"This man who was supposed to be the love of my life was telling me he was calling off the wedding less than an hour before we were due on the beach.
"I didn't even ask why.
"I told him to leave. "
In her letter, she speaks about how she was about to marry a man that was her best friend, who she'd met two years earlier at a baseball game.
She describes them as besotted and said when he proposed after six months on a beach at sunrise, it didn't feel too soon.
Cyndi writes: "I was 23 and it felt as if life was coming together.
"People would say how good we were as a match."
But somehow everything went wrong.
"I had to watch from the window as my sister went to the beach and let everyone know," she told.
"He'd actually left me.
"I was heartbroken."
Cyndi had to stay at the holiday resort for a week, bumping into her ex-fiancée who also stayed on the island.
She describes how she tried to pack her days with activities to stop her thinking about things, and to try and tire herself out so she would fall asleep at night.
The devastated woman ends the letter with: "The reason he gave for calling it off was that he didn't want children and I did.
"He never said why that became an irresolvable issue only on the day itself.
"Eventually we lost touch.
"Now, six years on, I've started dating again.
"What happened is far enough in the past now not to hurt so much.
"I can even laugh about it."
