The Second Best Man

Chapter Nine

The wedding party outing had been Wren's idea, "team bonding," she'd called it, which was a generous name for eleven people crammed onto a rented boat for a sunset sail around Harbor's Rest's little curve of coastline, half of them strangers to each other, all of them drinking slightly too much rosé in the golden hour light.

Cass had planned to spend the whole thing avoiding Eli. It had seemed like a reasonable plan on paper.

It fell apart within the first twenty minutes, when Wren's cousin, a sweet, anxious twenty-two-year-old named Priya who'd been roped into being a bridesmaid despite barely knowing Wren, got seasick before they'd even cleared the marina, and Eli was the one who noticed first. Not Wren, buried in seating chart logistics with the caterer. Not Cass, three glasses in and determined to enjoy herself out of spite. Eli, quietly, without making a thing of it, guided Priya to the rail, held her hair back without being asked, and produced a tin of ginger chews from his jacket pocket like he'd been carrying them for this exact purpose.

"You just have those?" Cass asked, once Priya had stabilized and gone below deck to lie down.

"My grandmother used to get seasick," Eli said, as if it was nothing, already turning to check on something else, already moving on before Cass could decide what to do with the small, unwelcome warmth spreading in her chest.

She watched him for the rest of the sail without quite meaning to. He wasn't performing for anyone; she'd have caught that instantly, five years of practice reading the difference between a Marchetti being genuinely decent and a Marchetti being decent for an audience. This was just how he moved through a room. Refilling someone's drink before they noticed it was empty. Steering a stilted conversation between two guests who didn't know each other toward common ground. Standing slightly apart from the group most of the time, as he'd never quite learned he was allowed to take up space in the center of things.

"You're staring," Wren said, appearing at her elbow with the particular smugness of a woman who'd been waiting all evening for an opening.

"I'm not staring."

"You're doing the soft-eyes thing. It's new. I don't love it, but it's new."

"There is no soft-eyes thing."

"Cass." Wren leaned against the railing beside her, voice dropping out of teasing into something gentler. "I've known you twelve years. I watched you build an entire personality around never letting a Marchetti get under your skin again. And I'm just saying from where I'm standing, it's not working."

Cass opened her mouth to argue and found, humiliatingly, that she didn't have anything to say.

"You don't hate him as much as you say you do," Wren said, quiet, not unkind. "I'm not telling you what to do with that. I'm just telling you I see it."

Across the deck, Eli laughed at something really laughed, unguarded, head tipping back at a joke one of the groomsmen had made, and the sound of it landed somewhere low in Cass's chest, unwelcome and specific, the kind of thing she hadn't let herself feel in five years on principle.

"It doesn't matter what I feel," Cass said, mostly to herself. "There's still a version of that night I don't know. Daniel as good as told me so. I can't build anything on top of a foundation I don't even understand yet."

Wren studied her for a moment, something careful crossing her face. "Have you asked Eli directly? Not sideways. Directly."

"I've tried. He shuts down every time."

"Then maybe," Wren said, "you're asking the wrong question."

Before Cass could ask what that meant, the boat lurched hard, sudden, the whole deck tilting as the captain shouted something from the wheel about the wind picking up faster than the forecast had promised and across the deck, Cass watched Eli's easy laughter vanish, his whole body going alert and focused as he started moving people below deck with the same calm competence he'd used to solve the venue crisis, the sky behind him going the color of a bruise.

"Storm's coming in faster than they said," he called across the deck, finding her eyes for one brief, charged second before turning back to the chaos. "Everybody below. Now."

Cass looked out at the horizon, where the gold light had gone the color of an old wound, dark clouds rolling in low and fast over the water, and felt the first cold drop of rain hit her face.