Page 22 of The Bridesmaid (Brides of Beaufort 3)

“Me too. But again,” Shelby said, waving a hand, “this isn’t about us. Moving back to Zac.”

I pouted. “Do we have to?”

“Yes, we have to,” Shelby replied. “Because we’re here for you and you’re hurting.”

The rest of them seemed to agree, so I sighed. “Fine. Well, after I told him about how he’d taken that choice from me and made all these terrible assumptions, he looked really sad. Like, ridiculously sad. I’ve never seen him like that. He apologized, of course, but it was like there was this big wall between us that he hadn’t been able to see before, you know?”

They all nodded, and Lyndi patted my leg. “Then what?”

“Then, I asked him why he moved to Bluffton. Obviously, I figured he’s been stationed close, and he has—Parris Island this time instead of Beaufort. But I wanted to know why he chose to live in Bluffton.”

“What’d he say?” my sister asked.

“That he moved here because he still loves me and wanted to see if I’d be willing to try again. But it was funny, because when he said it, I could tell he realized how wrong he’d been to think it would be that easy.”

Lyndi rolled her eyes. “Gee, ya think?”

“Clearly, he wasn’t thinking. Well, he thought about himself. And I guess about Grayson, since he’d just lost his mom and he didn’t want him to lose another mother figure if I bailed on them. But come on, he couldn’t have been actually thinking about me. If he had, he wouldn’t have thought I’d say yes if I wasn’t in it for real.”

“He didn’t trust you.”

I pointed at Aria. “Yep. Nail on the head. And that’s what I told him. That it all came down to trust, and he hadn’t trusted me. And then I told him that I definitely didnotwant to try again because clearly my trust in him was gone, too.”

“Wow,” Shelby said, letting out a long sigh while everyone processed my story. Then she tilted her head, eyeing me carefully. “So, now what?”

“Now, nothing. We cleared the air, we can move on. And speaking of moving on, now that you have the full story, can we move on to talking about happy things again? Like Aria’s wedding? The rehearsal dinner is two weeks from tonight, so I’m sure you’ve got stuff to talk to us about.”

Aria hesitated, but the pleading in my voice and expression must have convinced her that I was desperate to stop talking about this. “Okay, yeah. There’s a lot to do since this is such a quick wedding. We can talk about that.”

“Thank you,” I said, relaxing against the back of the couch.

Sure, it was hard to always be a bridesmaid on other people’s happy days but focusing on that was a lot easier than thinking about my own heart. Because right now, it wasn’t broken like it had been before. It was just … numb.