Chapter thirty-five
George
The last notes of the string quartet dissolve into the rustling of guests rising from their chairs, the soft percussion of a hundred people remembering they have somewhere to be. I don't move toward the doors.
Instead I reach for the nearest row of chairs and begin straightening them, a task that does not need doing. The white fabric chair covers are already perfectly aligned. I straighten them anyway, running my fingers along each one with the focused attention of a man who has absolutely no interest in examining his own feelings.
I tell myself this is useful. That someone has to make sure the space is cleared properly. The sound of laughter and champagne flutes drifts in from the reception hall, high and bright and relentlessly festive, and I turn my back to it.
Eleanor appears in my peripheral vision, still in her gown, threading between the empty chairs with the particular grace of someone who has spent the last eight hours being looked at and is now redirecting that energy entirely at me. She reaches pastme and takes the clipboard from the table beside me (probably as an excuse) and the faint scent of her perfume, something floral and expensive, drifts past with it.
"You're reorganizing chairs."
She doesn't phrase it as a question, which is the part that irritates me.
"I'm making sure everything is taken care of," I say, already reaching for the stack of printed programs nobody has bothered to collect. She takes those too, tucking them under the arm that holds the clipboard with an ease that suggests she has been confiscating things from me mentally for years.
There's a small smirk at the corner of her mouth. I look away from it.
"George."
Just my name, two syllables, delivered the way a surgeon sets down a scalpel. Precise. Unhurried. Final.
"This isn't about the chairs."
I open my mouth to disagree and she holds up one hand, the clipboard still in it, the gesture almost comically authoritative in the middle of a flower-strewn ceremony space. Rice is still scattered across the aisle floor. A single white petal has caught on the hem of her dress.
"You look miserable," she says, "and you haven't stopped scanning the room since the vows ended."
I realize, with some discomfort, that she is correct about the scanning. I hadn't been aware I was doing it until she named it, and now I can't unknow it.
"I haven't seen you look relieved once." She tilts her head slightly, studying me. "Not since you ended things with Tessa."
The wordsended thingshit differently spoken aloud, in this room, with the ghost of organ music still hanging in the air. I don't answer immediately, which is itself an answer.
"You're about to let the best thing in your life go," Eleanor says, calm and flat, "because you're afraid."
The accuracy of that is so precise it produces a brief, physical sensation in my chest. I tell her the relationship complicated things professionally. That it could reflect badly on Tessa. That stepping back was the responsible choice.
I hear myself cycling through all three justifications in rapid succession, my voice even and reasonable, and somewhere in the middle of it I become aware that I sound exactly like someone who has rehearsed this until it stopped feeling like a lie.
Eleanor waits for me to finish with a skeptical tilt to her eyebrows.
"You always do this." She says it without heat, which is worse than if she'd said it with heat. "When things start to get messy, you freak out. But the truth is, love is worth the messy parts."
A beam of late afternoon light cuts through the high windows and lands squarely between us, warm and slightly accusatory, and I have the absurd, unguarded thought that Eleanor looks extraordinarily elegant telling me off at her own wedding.
"If this is really about ERS," she says, "then fix that." She lets one beat of silence land. "But don't pretend this is out of your hands when it isn't."
She sets the clipboard back on the table (I knew it was an excuse) and walks toward the reception doors without looking back, her gown trailing behind her across the rice-scattered floor.
I stand in the empty room with the noise of the party bleeding through the walls and nothing left to straighten. The chairs are straight. The programs are stacked. Every small invented task is complete, and the absence of them is louder than I expected.
I pull my phone from my jacket pocket.
I don't think about the timing, or the optics, or whether this is the correct moment. I just dial Evelyn's number, the way you jump before you've finished deciding to.
It rings twice.
