Here's my take.  Weighing in at exactly 500 words, here's "The White Lie":

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And through all of this not-just-physical pain, she wanted to laugh at how silly it was that she was instinctively holding up her Dress.

None of it mattered, of course, once she found out that he had ran.

But she still unconsciously held up the dress, not wanting to expose it to the crumpled leaves, dangling branches, and dirt of the woods.  She needed to preserve the iridescent white that she had marveled at only an hour before.

But why?  What did it matter now that it was all over?

She hadn't seen it coming.  There was this unspoken communication between them.  One where she said untruths, made everything seem like it was okay.  And he saw through the untruths and loved her anyway.  Unconditionally.  Even when it took two tries to get her to agree to marry him.

She hadn't been sure.  Not until this moment, in the woods.

But why had he ran?  He was always so sure.  Perpetually sure.

She Stopped running.  

Bending over, she put her hands on her knees and began violently retching.  Through her tears, she saw that some of the vomit got onto her dress. 

That is when she started laughing.

Her violent, soul-shaking laughter echoed throughout the empty woods.

How hard she had tried to keep things clean.  To maintain the image that her life was this pure, ivory white.  To build a relationship that relied on a man's unyielding love to disregard her own fabrication of sanity.  To hold up her wedding dress in the woods, not for the purposes of making running easier, but so that if she ever caught up to him, she would be able to maintain the white lie.

The laughter stopped as quickly as it came, and she crumpled to the ground, realizing that it was useless.  Since she met him, she had never been able to catch up to him emotionally.  What made her think that she'd be able to catch up to him now, in a footrace through the woods? 

She knew that he must have been so far away by now, happier and more relieved with every step he took away from her and the muddied dress that now defined her.

She missed him desperately as she envisioned him taking his first step to a million possible new lives.  All of them, free of her.

Of all the countless places that she saw him, however, the one place she didn't consider was the church, where he was still standing, holding the flowers that her sister had seen him dash into the woods to pick before the ceremony.

-Youngman Brown