The Second Best Man

Chapter Eight

The Cliff House sat exactly where its name promised, perched on a bluff at the northern edge of Harbor's Rest with the Pacific stretched out gray-blue and endless below it, and Cass arrived ten minutes early specifically so she wouldn't have to walk in after Eli and have it read as anything.

He was already there anyway, standing at the edge of the gravel lot in a gray sweater with his hands in his pockets, looking out at the water like he had something to say to it. He turned when he heard her car.

"You're early," he said.

"So are you."

"I didn't want to be the last one here." A faint, wry twist at the corner of his mouth almost a smile, gone before it could commit to being one. "Given the last few days, I thought it was safer."

Cass huffed something that wasn't quite a laugh, but was closer to one than she'd meant to get. "Smart."

They stood there for a moment in the wind coming up off the cliff, the awkward, charged quiet of two people who'd run out of safe things to say and hadn't found their way to the unsafe ones yet. Overhead, gulls wheeled and complained. Somewhere behind them, a car door slammed the venue coordinator, probably, or Delia, come to smooth over the double-booking crisis with the particular brisk cheer of a woman paid handsomely to make disasters look like minor inconveniences.

"I should apologize," Eli said suddenly, before Cass could brace for it. "For yesterday. I didn't handle it well."

"Which part?"

"Any of it." He looked out at the water instead of at her, which she was starting to recognize as a habit that he found it easier to say true things when he didn't have to watch her hear them. "Walking in on you and Daniel. Being short with you after. None of that was fair to you."

"You don't owe me an apology for walking into a dress shop, Eli."

"Maybe not for that part." He was quiet a beat too long. "For the rest, I think I do."

Cass studied him, the set of his jaw, the careful way he held himself, like a man perpetually bracing against something only he could see coming, and felt the same unwelcome tug she'd felt in the photograph three nights ago, the sense that the story she'd been carrying about him for five years had a hole in it she hadn't let herself look at.

"Can I ask you something," she said, "and will you actually answer it, or will you do the thing where you almost answer and then your phone rings?"

Something flickered in his expression, caught out, maybe, or something closer to rueful. "I'll try."

"What happened between you and Daniel? Yesterday, in the shop. And five years ago." She watched him carefully. "Is it the same thing?"

For one long moment, Eli didn't answer at all. The wind pulled at his hair, at the collar of his sweater, and out past the cliff's edge the water kept moving the way it always had, indifferent to any of this, and Cass thought not for the first time that she could read almost everything about this man except the one thing she actually needed to know.

"Cass—"

"Eli! Cass! Thank God." Delia's voice cut across the gravel lot, bright and harried, saving him from having to finish whatever he'd been about to say. "Okay, we have a situation, but it's a fixable situation, so nobody panic the Cliff House double-booked October eighteenth, but they've got October twenty-fifth open, which just means we need to re-walk the whole layout for a fall sunset instead of an afternoon ceremony, and I need both of you to help me figure out if the light works for photos at that hour, because Wren will actually combust if the photos aren't right"

Eli exhaled, something that might have been relief or might have been regret, and fell into step beside Delia without looking back at Cass, the moment closing over like water.

Cass followed a beat behind, her question unanswered, filing away the way she'd started filing away everything else these past few days, the specific, careful way Eli had looked right before Delia's voice had reached them.

Not guilty exactly.

Relieved to have an excuse not to answer.

Which, Cass thought, walking across the gravel toward the cliff's edge, might have been the most honest thing he'd told her all week even though he hadn't said a single word.