The Second Best Man

Chapter Six

The bell over the shop door chimed, and Daniel stepped inside like a man walking onto a stage he hadn't rehearsed for.

"Cass," he said. "I saw you through the window. I wasn't going to come in, and then I thought that's stupid; I'm allowed to say hello to someone at a dress shop, it's a public building."

"You mouthed something at me through the glass," Cass said. "That's not exactly hello."

A faint flush crept up his neck. Five years hadn't changed Daniel the way it had changed his brother; he still had that same boyish uncertainty, the same habit of talking faster when he was nervous, like he could outrun the awkwardness if he just kept moving. It used to be endearing. Now it just made her tired.

"I said you look good," he admitted. "Which, in retrospect, is a strange thing to mouth at your ex through a storefront window."

Behind Cass, the seamstress cleared her throat delicately and excused herself to "check on the champagne silk in the back," which fooled absolutely no one and bought them exactly as much privacy as a woman with excellent instincts for a scene could manage.

"You didn't answer my text," Daniel said, once they were alone, his voice dropping the performative brightness. "The one about talking."

"I answered. I said things were busy."

"That's not an answer, that's a wall." He exhaled, dragging a hand through his hair, and for a second he looked less like the golden, easy boy she remembered and more like someone who'd been carrying something heavy for a long time and was tired of the weight. "Cass, I meant what I said. Be careful what you assume you already know. That wasn't me being cryptic for the fun of it."

"Then stop being cryptic and just tell me."

"I can't." The words came out fast, almost desperate. "Not like this. Not standing in a dress shop with Delia's seating chart taped to the wall behind you. It's not — it's not a hallway conversation, Cass, it's a sit-down conversation, and I don't think you're ready to have it yet, and honestly I'm not sure I am either."

Cass felt something twist tight in her chest: frustration and a strange, unwelcome hope tangled together so thoroughly she couldn't have separated them if she tried.

"You can't just say there are things I don't know and then refuse to say what they are," she said. "That's not fair, Daniel."

"I know." His jaw worked, so exactly like his brother's that Cass had to look away from it. "I know it isn't. I need just give me some time. I need to figure out how to say it in a way that doesn't—"

The bell over the door chimed again.

Cass turned, and her stomach dropped clean through the floor for the second time in a week.

Eli stood in the doorway of the dress shop, one hand still on the door, his eyes moving from Cass to his brother and back again with an expression that had gone completely, utterly still the specific, controlled blankness of a man who had just walked into the exact conversation he'd spent five years hoping never to witness.

"Am I interrupting something?" Eli said. It wasn't a question.

Nobody answered him.