“So what's wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“You've got your look on.”
“This is my regular face.”
“Exactly.” He crosses his arms. “Spill.”
I don't want to. I want to sit here with my list and my empty mug and be left alone. But Justin is my brother, and he's not leaving, and he's got steady patience from hauling nets for a living and understands that some things take time to surface.
“It's a wedding,” I say.
“Yeah. That's generally what happens before a marriage.”
“At my marina.”
“Our marina. Dad's marina. Whatever.”
“A big, loud, celebrity spectacle.Paparazzi. People in kayaks with telephoto lenses. Drones buzzing the dock. It's going to be a circus, Justin.”
“Probably.”
“These slips were built for fishing boats and shrimp trawlers. Not mega yachts and cocktail parties.”
“The wood doesn't care what's parked on it as long as the pilings hold.”
“The pilings mightnothold. That's my point.”
“Is it, though?”
I look at him. He looks at me. He knows the dock isn't what's bothering me. He's going to make me say it anyway, because that's what brothers do—they sit there with their arms crossed until you crack.
“It's awedding,” I say again. Quieter.
Justin is still for a beat. Then he nods, once.
“Yeah,” he says. “It is.”
We sit with that. The dock office creaks. A pelican lands on the railing outside the window with a thud that sounds personal.
“Holly would've loved this,” Justin says, and his voice goes careful. People always go careful with her name around me, like it's a match they're trying not to strike.
Holly.
I don't say her name much. I think it plenty—when I'm checking the dock at dawn and the light hits the water in that golden way she used to photograph. When Dawson laughs, really laughs, not the teenage grunt that passes for amusement, because he sounds exactly like her. At two in the morning when the boat rocks and the other side of the bed is empty and has been empty for ten years and I still sleep on my side like I'm making room.
My jaw aches. I've been clenching it.
“She would have,” I say, because it's true. Holly would have been in the middle of it. She would have known Delilah's favorite flowers and how to arrange the tables so everyone could see the sound. She would have been friends with Emma—bestfriends, probably—the photographer and the woman who loved beautiful things, and they would have ganged up on me about the running lights and I would have lost every argument and been quietly happy about it.
“She would have dragged you into it,” Justin says. “You'd have been carrying centerpieces and pretending to hate it.”
“I wouldn't have been faking.”
“You absolutely would have.”
He's right. Holly had a way of making me participate in things I claimed to despise, and then I'd be halfway through, enjoying myself againstmy will, and she'd give me that look—I know you, Paul Spencer, and you're not fooling anyone—and I'd have to just surrender. She was right about everything, for thirteen years, until she wasn't there to be right anymore.
