“At the cottage, but she actually had to fly back to New York to get something. She’ll be back tonight.”
“Oh no! There wasn’t anyone who could go for her?” Hannah gave Natalie a pointed look.
“She wanted to take care of it,” Natalie said as brightly as possible. “Sorry, I gotta run. I’ll see you at the rehearsal later!”
When she reached Jonathan’s room, she paused and took a deep, steadying breath. She’d already mortified herself enough for one weekend; she needed at least one social interaction to go smoothly or else she’d turn around and walk straight into the sea. She knocked loudly.
“Come in!” Jonathan’s voice called.
“You sure? Are you decent?”
“Only one way to find out!”
Natalie opened the door and stepped in, blushing with residual embarrassment from yesterday’s mishap, and found a fully dressed Jonathan standing next to an old-fashioned writing desk, fiddling with his laptop. He wore the same thick-framed glassesthat’d always made Natalie’s heart flutter in college, the ones Marigold kept calling outdated.
“I’m sorry again about yesterday,” Natalie said. “I still can’t believe they gave me the wrong room key.”
“It’s fine,” Jonathan said with a grin. “Consider it your consolation prize.”
The air hissed out of Natalie’s lungs like a leaky air mattress. “Sorry, what?”
“You know, because the stripper fell through? At the bachelorette party?”
“Oh, right,” Natalie said, trying to hide her relief.
He picked his laptop off the desk and flopped onto the bed just like he’d done hundreds of times in college, back when Natalie wouldn’t have hesitated to flop down next to him. But that was a lifetime ago. Now they were fully fledged adults and Jonathan was less than thirty-six hours away from marrying Natalie’s best friend.
But didn’t that make things safer, in a way? There was no more ambiguity. No more what-ifs. Everyone had made their choices. There was nothing Natalie could do to change things. Perhaps there’d been a point years ago when she could’ve pulled a Hail Mary and gone for it, but now Natalie couldn’t confess her feelings without looking like the most delusional sociopath on the planet.
Jonathan opened his laptop. “So I have a draft of my vows, but I want to make sure they aren’t too cheesy. You know how much Marigold hates that stuff.”
“Definitely,” Natalie said, still standing. “Do you want to email it to me?”
“Sure… or you could just read it on my computer? I promiseI’ve showered since I was last in the hospital. Although I guess you know that already. Hey, is that why you walked in on me? Did you need firsthand proof that I’d washed off the hospital germs before you got too close?”
Twin waves of embarrassment crashed over her—the reminder of yesterday’s mortifying mishap and the reference to her notorious germophobia. Back when Jonathan was in med school, he’d sometimes swing by her apartment after work, and even Natalie’s all-consuming crush hadn’t been enough to allow him to sit on her couch in his scrubs.
She rolled her eyes and sat on the bed next to Jonathan. “I only freaked out when there was that outbreak of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, which even you have to admit isn’t unreasonable.”
“And the so-called Ebola outbreak?”
“There were cases in New York!”
“Not at my hospital!”
“You don’t know that. They could’ve had asymptomatic Ebola.”
“That’s not a thing.”
“You know, I think Liesl might be onto something. Youareone of those know-it-all doctors.”
“If I were, would I be asking you for help?”
“Touche.” She purposely mispronounced the word it so it rhymed withdouche, a family joke of Natalie’s that Jonathan had adopted.
She took the laptop from him and steeled herself for the inevitable stabs of pain. She’d accepted that Jonathan was marrying her best friend, that he’d chosen Marigold over her. But she wasn’t super keen to read Jonathan’s justification forwhy. Not that it was all that difficult to understand: Marigold wasmodel-pretty, funny, and supremely sweet to boot. She had her clueless, callous moments—as did most beautiful, rich people who led charmed lives—but at her core, Marigold was kind and caring. Natalie didn’t begrudge Jonathan for his choice, but she didn’t have a burning desire to see it all through his eyes.
Yet to her surprise, Jonathan’s vows were a tad generic. He praised the same qualities everyone saw in Marigold; it was a speech that could’ve been written by anyone close to her. Or even just someone who knew and liked her.
