The maid of honor snorts at that. “Those would be some expensive regrets.”
“I’m feeling surprisingly chill, now that I know I’m not going to be flashing my ass to my new husband’s parents,” Naomi says. “I’ll be even better if Nana Pearl manages to stay away from the bar all evening.”
She wouldn’t be our first drunk grandma. I’ve seen every kind of wild wedding guest: friends who give humiliating toasts complete with PowerPoint presentations, parents who refuse to acknowledge the other family, even a woman who declared her love for her sister’s groom when the officiant asked if anyone objected. Ever the superhero, Mom shuffled her outside, calmed her down, and kept her far away from the bride the rest of the night.
I run my palm over the bottom of the last pair of shoes. “All set.”
“I never would have thought of that with the shoes,” Naomi says. “You guys are amazing.”
“Speaking of alcohol,” one of the bridesmaids says. “Is there any way we could get some champagne?”
Mom glances up from her sewing. “There’s no champagne? Isaac was supposed to make sure all the rooms were stocked.”
A tiny furrow appears between her brows when she mentions my dad, so slight you wouldn’t notice unless you were looking for it.
I am always looking.
“I’ll get it,” I say, rising to my feet so fast my knees pop. I like it in here, but I’ll do anything to keep that furrow off my mom’s face. “And some straws.” To avoid smudged lipstick. We use biodegradable ones whenever we can.
“Quinn, shouldn’t you be warming up?” Mom checks her watch. “Guests will be arriving in thirty minutes.”
“I’m warm,” I insist, because going outside will bring me that much closer to confronting a certain driver of a certain Honda Civic. Mom lifts her eyebrows in a nothing-less-than-our-best kind of way I know not to question.
At least she’s not thinking about my dad and what he was or wasn’t supposed to do anymore. Maybe the champagne seemed small, insignificant, but I should know that’s all it takes to shatter something I was so sure could never break.
And because my anxiety-brain is never content to stress over one thing when it could be stressing over five, I also know I can’t delay the inevitable: trying to look elegant while Jonathan stares at me, or worse, deliberately avoids eye contact. If he manages to talk to me, he’s going to want to know why I broke up with him.
And I’m not sure I can give him an answer if I can’t even figure it out for myself.
The harp is the kind of instrument usually associated with old ladies or baby angels in Renaissance art who are all dead behind the eyes. I learned from my grandma, who played at weddings and retirement homes and babysat me when my parents were busy building their business. Her music was the only thing that could lull me to sleep. That evolved into spending hours upon hours watching her as I grew older, and as soon as my coordination skills caught up with my fascination, she started teaching me with a child-sized 22-string. Her death when I was twelve sapped some of the joy from it, and my parents sapped the rest. The following year they started offering me to their clients as a fun bonus—book Borrowed + Blue and we’ll throw in our harpist daughter for free!
With everything else, I can force a smile. I can pretend I still believe in the magic of happily ever after, that the bride and groom will always gaze at each other the way they’re going to under the chuppah tonight. But these days my grandma’s Lyon & Healy, though gorgeous, feels like a fifty-pound weight on my shoulders.
I follow Asher back down the stairs so she can fetch the champagne while I put on a plastic grin and play scales. I have to go through the kitchen to get outside, where my harp is sitting near the chuppah, but I pause in the doorway when I hear a flurry of activity inside.
“… didn’t realize you’d be back today!” one of Mansour’s staff cater-waiters says, clapping a tall, dark-haired guy on the shoulder as he buttons a black vest over a white shirt. “How was your first year?”
A low voice answers back something I don’t catch because there’s no way this is really happening.
Didn’t realize you’d be back.
No. No no no. This was not something I ever considered a possibility and therefore didn’t let myself stress about it. I would take a hundred Jonathan Gellners interrogating me about our sexual history over this. This is at the top of my Bad Decisions with Boys list, and we’ve never so much as held hands, unless you count the flail-dancing we did as kids.
He must have been in Seattle on breaks from school, but they never coincided with weddings B+B was working with Mansour’s, and while I couldn’t forget him completely, I’d finally been able to thought-spiral about him only every other week. A real victory after what happened last year.
Maybe I can go around back. Maybe I can slip outside before he sees me. I have to slip outside before he sees me, before—
“Quinn?”
That voice. It’s a time machine of familiar longing, tugging me back to the weddings our families worked together, the days we spent stealing sweets off caterers’ trays. The nights we spent in some of the loveliest places in the Seattle area, the scenery playing tricks on me, turning a childhood crush into something heavier. The email I sent last September, hazy with the end-of-summer blues, confessing my feelings to him.
The email he never answered.
Tarek Mansour is staring right at me, black tie loose around his neck, vest half-buttoned. The pleats in his slacks are crisp, like they’ve been freshly ironed. His eyelashes are long and his hair is longer and my lungs are tight, tight, tight.
“Been a while,” he says, mouth curving up slightly.
