Page 7

Rhys

Because let’s review.

I’m supposed to make sure that Eden and Paul get married…and he just jilted her.

If Arthur Weggers finds out, Hanna will lose her business and we’ll lose our family’s land.

The bride in my car is understandably wounded and furious and determined to track down her (ex?) fiancé.

It’s unclear whether this situation is salvageable at all, and if so, how I’d salvage it—but I have to try.

“Fine,” she says.

When I pull over, there are twenty-seven missed calls from Hanna and another eighteen or so from my other siblings—she must have called them.

There are, however, no calls from Arthur Weggers. I’m going to take that as a good sign since I’m pretty sure he would lose no time in lording it over me if he had evidence I’d shat the bed.

I don’t listen to my voicemails. I can guess what they say.

Hanna answers right away. “What the fuck, Rhys? Where are you?”

I quickly fill her in on everything that has happened since I got Paul’s note and texted her, and she curses and moans for a while—as well she should, given the stakes.

But she’s Hanna—ever practical—so in a few minutes she rallies and says, “You have to get them back together.”

I’ve already thought about whether I can reunite Eden and Paul and rescue this situation for Hanna.

In fact, at first, I thought that’s where Eden was going.

To chase down Paul, to plead with him. And as much as I didn’t want that to happen, I also knew it might be the best possible outcome.

For Hanna, definitely. And maybe even for Eden.

“Look,” Hanna says. “I know she says she wants those quilts. But maybe that’s an excuse. A way she can chase him down without looking pathetic.”

“Why would she want to do that? He jilted her.”

Hanna makes a scoffing sound. “People get cold feet!” she says. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to drag a groom out of a bar, pour water over his head and coffee down his throat, and prop him up at the altar.”

“Jesus!” I say. “No wonder I have a job.”

“It’s not real ambivalence,” she says. “They want to get married. They’re just freaking the fuck out, because that’s what people about to get married do .

The worst case I’ve ever seen was two brides, both with cold feet.

They’re really happy now, though. I get a Christmas card every year from them thanking me for sorting them out.

So that’s what this is—cold feet. He just got ’em worse than average.

So track him down, sober him up, and let’s get this show back on the road.

I told Weggers we were postponing the wedding because of a family emergency. Prove me right.”

“And he bought the family-emergency thing?”

“Who knows what goes on in that man’s head?” she says.

Can’t argue with that. “What if I can’t get them back together?”

“We can’t go there,” Hanna says. “We have to believe for now. Family emergency. Cold feet. Postponed wedding. Find him.”

Her dogged certainty is contagious. “Okay.”

“In the meantime, Arthur Weggers says you have to do all the rebooking and rescheduling yourself. Apparently you can delegate individual tasks to me, but I can’t start doing damage control according to my own preferences, or you’re not doing your job.”

I groan. Mr. Letter of the Law. “Okay. Got it. On it. I’ll contact the vendors?—”

“And the guests, obviously. Tell them what we’re telling Weggers.”

“I can’t tell Paul’s parents it’s a family emergency.”

“Tell them it’s her family’s emergency.”

“She doesn’t have much family,” I say, thinking, See, I do know you .

“And tell her family it’s his family’s emergency. Throw something in about everyone needing some privacy right now, so they don’t compare notes.”

“You’re diabolical,” I tell her.

“I’m good at crisis management and herding cats. You have to be, in my line of work. And in case this wasn’t clear, I think you should actually rebook the wedding for next month so we can point to that if Weggers starts sniffing around.”

“Are we available?”

“I did some scrambling and snuck her into a Sunday eleven-a.m. slot at the end of October. We’ll do two that day.”

“Can we pull that off?”

“We have to.”

She names a date and time, and I write it down.

“Done,” I say. “Or will be, as soon as I get back there.”

“Which will be when?” she asks.

“Eden said he’s at his family’s beach house on the Washington coast, which is another…four and a half hours? We get her quilts?—”

“Definitely get the quilts, but the main thing is you sit them down and make them talk it out until he realizes he was just freaking out and begs her for forgiveness and another chance. He’s head over heels for her, and his ambivalence was temporary insanity caused by cold feet.”

I can, unfortunately, picture the scenario Hanna is describing, and I straight-up hate it.

I hate the image of Paul pleading for forgiveness, but even more than that, I hate the idea of Eden granting it.

Of her slinking back into his squirrelly commitment-phobe arms and telling him that she understands his cold feet are nothing but that.

Still, there are two things I hate almost as much as that scenario: Hanna losing her business, and Blue Iron Mining getting my family’s land.

And in the end, it doesn’t matter how much I hate the idea of Eden and Paul getting back together, because even if they don’t, I’m still the man who destroyed her life.

“Do you really think it’s just cold feet?”

“Yes,” Hanna says.

Sometimes I really appreciate my sister’s clear-cut view of the world.

“I’ll fix it,” I tell her again and hang up.

When I get back into the car, Eden’s on the phone.

“I know this is asking a lot, but can you take over running In Stitches till I get back?” she says to whoever it is. “Honestly, taking care of the store is the best thing you can do for me. I swear. I don’t want company. I want to lick my wounds.”

Silence.

“Rhys can drive me. Despite his other flaws, he seems like a safe driver.”

“Thanks,” I mutter, and she rolls her eyes in my direction.

I start the car again.

“He doesn’t count as company,” she tells the phone.

“Jesus,” I say. “Tell us how you really feel.”

“I love you, too, sweetie. And I’m going to be fine. I’ve been through worse.” She’s silent for a bit, then says, “I know. But I’ve done it before, and I can do it again… Yeah. Love you. Bye.” She drops her phone into her lap, taps to hang up. “Mari,” she tells me.

We both stare at the road for several miles without speaking. I’m thinking about how to broach the million-dollar question.

“Hanna says,” I begin, “that cold feet are really comm?—”

“Don’t,” she says.

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t try to convince me that everything’s going to be okay.”

I close my mouth. Because despite Hanna’s outsized optimism about Eden and Paul getting back together, I don’t actually think everything’s going to be okay. Even if they somehow patch up this episode of “cold feet,” Paul will always be the guy who left her at the altar and humiliated her.

Under the best of circumstances, marriages are a shit show. To start one like this…

I can’t wish it for her.

And yet I have to.

Fuuuuuuck me.

“I don’t deserve what he did to me,” she says.

“No,” I agree, before I can stop myself. “You don’t.”

I’m sorry, Hanna.

“I’m not chasing Paul so I can talk him out of his cold feet or whatever made him jilt me.”

Okay, look, I tell imaginary Hanna. Even if it turns out Paul does just have cold feet, I’m not going to be able to convince Eden to take him back. He has to do that. I need to get them face-to-face so he can realize he’s being a complete idiot.

Because let’s face it: Only a complete and total idiot would walk away from Eden Becker.

“You know what?” she says. “Let’s not talk. You don’t really want to talk to me anyway. When we get to the beach house, we’ll get the quilts and then get back in the car and drive again. That way we won’t have to force a conversation.”

“That’s very…mercenary.”

“Yeah, well, that’s me right now. Mercenary. It’s a put-one-foot-in-front-of-the-other situation, and so that’s what I’m doing.”

“If not-talking is what you need, then that’s fine?—”

“It’s what you want, too,” she says. “You don’t want to talk to me and I don’t want to talk to you, so we’d better find music we can agree on.”

“I’ve got a driving playlist on my phone.” I grab it from the door’s map pocket and toss it to her. “Route 66.”

“Original,” she mutters.

A moment later the strains of Elliott Smith’s “Waltz #2” slide from the speakers.

A couple of songs later, she bursts out, “What the hell is this music? You drive to this? I would fall asleep and swerve off the road. Or sink into despair, U-turn, and go back to wherever I came from.”

“It’s broody indie.”

“Yeah. I get that. But how the hell is that driving music ?”

I glance over at her. “You know,” I say. “I got the impression from your divorce proceedings that you were?—”

“A doormat?” she asks, and this time when I sneak a glimpse, she’s glaring. “Meek? Weak? Pathetic?”

“I didn’t say any of that.”

“You thought it.”

“Actually,” I say, “I didn’t.”

I don’t say, I thought you were brave and beautiful .

I don’t say, That last day, when you left the courtroom, I didn’t mean to follow you, but I did, and I saw you buy lunch for that homeless woman, even though we’d just taken all your money and you had every right to be selfish and keep every remaining penny to yourself .

“I thought you were in a shitty place and needed a better advocate than Sally DeSantis,” I say.

Goddamn. It turns out Eden was right—not talking would have been way better. There is no version of the universe where it’s okay for me to discuss the details of her divorce with her.

“Sally did fine.”

I clamp my jaw shut. Sally had traded half of Eden’s time with her dog for her budding business, and she didn’t have to.

If she’d understood the intersection of divorce law and corporate structures better, she could have held out and gotten Eden both the business and full-time custody.

And I’d hated Teller Austin, and it had just about killed me when I saw the grief on Eden’s face about her dog.

“I would have done better by you,” I say, because it’s the only thing I can say.

“Yeah, well,” she says, “instead you fucked me.” And then, “Extremely poor choice of words.”

A laugh rucks out of me.

“I really hate you,” she admits.

“I’m used to it,” I say, although I’m not. I’ll never get used to her hating me. “Someone always hates me. Someone loves me and someone hates me, and I have to find a way to live with it.”

“Boohoo-hoo,” she says. “You chose to do it. You chose to be a shark. You could have chosen to do those, what do you call ’em? Nicey-nice divorces.”

“Collaborative.” I bite back a smile. Nicey-nice. Maybe I could have at one point. But I have a reputation now. You don’t ask a shark to help you figure out how to swim in the same pool as your goldfish ex.

I don’t say that. I say, “Yeah.”

She goes quiet, listening to Jeff Buckley’s “Last Goodbye.” “I do like this song,” she says. “I just think your taste in music is funereal. And grossly wrong for driving.”

“Well,” I say. “The playlist is only ninety-seven minutes long.”