The Second Best Man

Chapter Seven

The silence in the dress shop stretched long enough that Cass could hear the seamstress's sewing machine humming faintly from the back room, oblivious to the standoff happening among the bolts of champagne silk.

"I was passing by," Eli said finally, though nothing about his tone suggested he believed that explanation was doing him any favors. "Delia texted about moving up the fitting. I didn't realize you'd already—" His eyes flicked to Daniel, something unreadable passing over his face. "I didn't realize you'd be here."

"I texted her," Daniel said. "That's allowed. She's still my—" He stopped himself, visibly, as he'd walked right up to the edge of a word he didn't have the right to use anymore. "She's Wren's maid of honor. We're going to be at the same wedding events for the next six months. It'd be strange if we never spoke."

"Nobody said it would be strange." Eli's voice was even, controlled, and entirely unconvincing. "I said you were here. That's all."

"Is that all you meant?"

The two brothers looked at each other with a weight that had nothing to do with a dress shop or a wedding, some old current running between them that Cass recognized without being able to name the specific, wordless argument of siblings who'd had the same fight so many times they no longer needed to say it out loud.

"I'm going to go check on the seamstress," Cass said, because standing between the Marchetti brothers while they had a conversation entirely in subtext was not how she intended to spend her Tuesday afternoon.

Neither of them stopped her. She wasn't sure either of them noticed.

She found the seamstress in the back room, pretending very hard to be occupied with a rack of bridesmaid dresses that did not need her attention, and the two of them stood there together for a moment in companionable, deliberate ignorance of the low, tense voices drifting from the front of the shop.

"Family stuff," the seamstress said sympathetically, not really a question.

"Something like that."

Cass couldn't make out words, just tone — Daniel's voice pitched low and urgent, Eli's clipped and short, the exchange going back and forth for almost a full minute before it cut off entirely. A moment later, the bell over the door chimed, hard, like it had been pushed rather than opened, and when Cass came back out front, Daniel was gone, and Eli was standing alone by the window, watching his brother's car pull away from the curb.

"What was that about?" Cass asked.

"Nothing." Eli didn't turn around.

"It didn't look like nothing."

"It never does, with him." He said it quietly, almost to himself, and there was something in the words old and tired and worn thin that made Cass's chest ache in a way she didn't have permission to feel, not for a man she was supposed to still be furious at.

"Eli." She waited until he turned to look at her. "What does he want to tell me?"

Something moved behind his eyes fast, careful, gone before she could catch it fully. For one long second, she thought he might actually answer her.

"You should ask him," Eli said instead.

"I did. He said it wasn't a hallway conversation. Or apparently a dress-shop conversation either."

"Then it isn't," Eli said, and something in his voice had gone hard now, guarded, the door she'd almost gotten a hand through slamming shut again. "Cass, I have to go. I'll see you at the cake tasting."

He was gone before she could stop him, the bell over the door chiming once more in his wake, and Cass stood alone in the dress shop surrounded by champagne silk and unfinished sentences, thinking that whatever was between the two Marchetti brothers, it had teeth and she was starting to suspect it had her name written somewhere inside it.

Her phone buzzed in her bag. She pulled it out, half-expecting Daniel again.

It was Wren instead, three texts in a row, each more frantic than the last.

CASS. 911. Not a real emergency but also kind of a real emergency.

The Cliff House called. They double-booked our date.

I need you and Eli at an emergency venue walkthrough tomorrow morning, or we might not have a wedding location in October. Please. I'm begging.

Cass closed her eyes, took one long breath, and thought about the particular, specific unfairness of a universe that kept finding new ways to lock her in a room with Eli Marchetti.