The Second Best Man

Chapter Five

Be careful what you assume you already know.

Cass didn't sleep.

She told herself it was the bed, unfamiliar, too soft, the guesthouse mattress nothing like her own, but she knew better by two in the morning, staring at the ceiling with Daniel's text still glowing behind her eyes. She hadn't answered it. She wasn't going to answer it. She'd decided that firmly, several times, and kept deciding it every time she reached for her phone and made herself put it back down.

She'd built five years on the certainty that she knew everything about that night. Every detail was worn smooth from handling, the way a stone goes smooth in a pocket you keep reaching into. The engagement party. The hallway outside the east wing bathroom, tucked away from the noise of the reception, where she'd gone to get five minutes alone before her own toast. The voices on the other side of the coat closet door were low, urgent, arguing about something she hadn't meant to overhear.

She's not good enough. You know that. Everyone knows that.

She'd been so sure it was Eli's voice. She'd been so sure of a lot of things at twenty-six, six weeks from a wedding, standing in a hallway with her heart in her throat and her whole future rearranging itself in real time.

Cass gave up on sleep a little after three and went hunting through the box she'd sworn she'd never open again, the one she'd shoved into the back of her closet five years ago and dragged along through two moves since, because throwing it away had always felt like a decision she wasn't ready to make. She hadn't packed it for this trip, or she hadn't meant to; it had ended up in her suitcase anyway, months ago, the day Wren got engaged, tucked in like a wound she'd decided to bring along just in case.

Photos. A save-the-date that never got sent. A hotel receipt from the night before everything fell apart.

And near the bottom, a photo she hadn't looked at in years: the whole wedding party, taken an hour before the engagement party had started, everyone laughing on the Wentworth Club lawn, gold light, champagne already going around. Cass in the middle, mid-laugh, Daniel's arm around her waist.

And just behind them, half out of frame, Eli not laughing, watching the two of them with an expression Cass had never once, in five years of replaying that night, actually looked at closely.

She looked at it now.

It wasn't contempt. She'd have sworn on her life it was contempt, back then, because contempt was the story she needed it to be a story where leaving made sense, where the ache in her chest had a clean villain attached to it. But contempt didn't look like this. This looked closer to worry. Close to the exact expression he'd worn on the sidewalk outside the flower shop that morning, right before his phone rang and cut him off.

Cass sat on the edge of the guesthouse bed with the photo in her hands until the sky outside started going gray at the edges, turning it over, looking for something she could explain away and not quite managing it.

She told herself it didn't mean anything. People made all kinds of faces in candid photos. It was one frame out of a whole night, and she was reading five years of hindsight into an expression that had probably lasted half a second and meant nothing at all.

She told herself that, and didn't believe it, and put the photo back in the box instead of throwing it away, which felt like its own kind of answer.

She didn't text Daniel back. She told herself that was the end of it.

But three days later, standing in a dress shop on Harbor Street with a bolt of champagne-colored silk draped over one arm, half-listening to the seamstress murmur about hemlines, Cass looked up and saw him Daniel standing just outside the shop window, not coming in, just standing there on the sidewalk like he'd been building up the nerve to for several minutes and hadn't managed it yet.

He saw her see him.

Neither of them moved for a long moment. Then he lifted a hand not quite a wave, something smaller, more tentative and mouthed something through the glass that Cass couldn't quite make out, and didn't have the first idea whether she wanted to.