The Second Best Man

Chapter Four

Cass stared at the text until the letters stopped meaning anything.

It’s Daniel. I heard you were back in town. We should talk.

“Everything okay?” Delia asked, already halfway back into her folder of vendor contracts, blessedly not looking up.

“Fine,” Cass said, and put the phone face-down on the table like that would make it stop existing.

Beside her, Eli had gone very quiet. She didn’t have to look at him to know he’d seen the screen; the flinch in his posture told her enough, a small, controlled tightening through his shoulders that he probably thought was invisible. It wasn’t. She’d spent five years learning to read the smallest signs of danger in a room, and apparently some instincts didn’t retire just because you’d moved four states away.

“We should get through the contract,” Eli said, low, not quite looking at her either. “Delia has a hard stop at eleven.”

“Right.” Cass picked up the pen. Signed her name in the wrong place first, had to cross it out, signed it again, aware the whole time of Eli watching the pen shake very slightly in her hand and saying nothing about it, which she appreciated more than she wanted to.

They got through the rest of the meeting on autopilot: venue timeline, toast logistics, a schedule for the cake tasting the following week that Cass agreed to without really hearing the date. By the time Delia released them back out onto Harbor Street, the morning had gone overcast, that particular gray coastal light that made the whole town look like it was holding its breath.

“You don’t have to talk to him,” Eli said.

Cass stopped on the sidewalk. She hadn’t expected him to bring it up at all, let alone unprompted, let alone with that specific note in his voice not concerned exactly, something closer to a warning.

“I wasn’t aware I needed your permission.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Then what did you mean?”

Eli was quiet for a moment, his jaw doing the thing again, the careful stillness she was starting to suspect wasn’t composure at all but something closer to restraint: a man holding a door shut with his whole body.

“Just that you don’t owe him a conversation,” he said finally. “Whatever he wants to say. You left. You don’t have to explain that to anyone, least of all him.”

It should have felt like solidarity. Instead it landed strange, off-center, like there was a version of this sentence underneath the one he’d actually said, and she couldn’t quite make out its shape.

“That’s an interesting thing for you to say,” Cass said slowly, “given that you’re the reason I left in the first place.”

Something crossed his face fast, there and gone, gone before she could name it, and for one suspended second she thought he was going to say something real. His mouth actually opened.

Then his phone rang, loud and sudden in the quiet street, and whatever had been about to happen folded itself back up and disappeared behind his eyes.

“I have to take this,” he said, already stepping back, already retreating into the particular careful blankness she remembered from five years ago, the one that meant a door had just closed somewhere she couldn’t see. “Cass”

“It’s fine,” she said, because it was easier than asking him to finish whatever he’d almost started.

He held her gaze for one more second long enough that she felt it in her chest, unwelcome and familiar all at once, and then he turned and answered the phone, walking off down Harbor Street with his shoulders set like he was bracing for weather.

Cass stood alone on the sidewalk outside the flower shop, her own phone still burning a hole in her bag, Daniel’s text unanswered, and thought, not for the first time since crossing the town line: this was supposed to be Wren’s easy, happy summer, and somehow I’ve landed in the middle of a minefield I don’t even have the map for.

She pulled out her phone. Typed a reply to Daniel three times, deleted it three times, and finally settled on the shortest version she could manage.

Maybe sometime. Things are busy right now with the wedding.

She hit send before she could second-guess it, shoved the phone back in her bag, and told herself that was the end of it; whatever Daniel wanted to talk about could stay exactly where she'd left it five years ago, buried, undisturbed, none of her business anymore.

She almost believed it. She made it nearly a block before her phone buzzed again, and against every instinct she had, she looked.

I understand. Just be careful what you assume you already know, Cass. About any of it.

She read it twice, a small cold feeling settling under her ribs that she didn't have a name for yet, and didn't have the first idea what to do with.