His flight back to London left at sixAM—that morning.
“What were youthinking?” I asked, staring baldly at him when he told me that. “Everything about this is completely crazy.”
Cooper nodded, like he agreed.
Then he handed me the chocolate bar I was reaching for.
Then he said, “I had something to say to you. And I wanted to say it in person.”
I studied him. “What? What could you possibly have had to say that required a transatlantic voyage?”
But he scrunched his face and shook his head. “I think now’s not the time.”
“What!”
He shrugged. “I’m not ready. Or maybe you’re not.”
“You cannot fly all the way herefor less than twenty-four hoursto say something that major—and then just not say it!”
But he could. And he did.
No amount of begging, arguing, threatening, or guilt-tripping changed his mind.
He took off for London at sixAM, as scheduled, without ever saying the thing he’d flown to Texas to say.
And all I could do was go home. And wonder what it was.
Six
THERE WERE SO—SO—MANYthings to dread about my sister’s wedding. The next wedding on the family agenda.
Not that I was making a list.
Did I mention that it was happening on a cruise ship?
No joke. An eight-day cruise to the Bahamas and Cozumel.
My big sister, Ashley, worked as a marketing manager for a cruise line called Escapes, and one of her many perks was discounted group fares. It was part of the reason she took the job. So when her boyfriend, Brody, popped the question, a cruise wedding was, as they both loved to say, “a no-brainer.”
I wasn’t much of a cruise ship person myself.
I wasn’t much of aweddingsperson lately, either.
But here we were.
Six weeks to the day after I left my perfect fiancé at the altar, my whole family would set sail from Galveston, Texas, for eight endless days at sea—accompanied by eighty of our dearest friends, lifelong neighbors, and weirdest relatives.
Twice the number of takers we’d had for my wedding, by the way.
Can’t beat a discount cruise.
And some—maybe notall, but plenty—of those people were going to be asking about, puzzling over, or teasing me about my wedding debacle for far too many of those eight days.
I should also mention that Brody, my sister’s groom, was actually a guy I had dated briefly in high school—for like a week—before I’d dumped him, like all the others.
That’s how he and Ashley met, in fact.
After the breakup, Brody had showed up on our front walk with flowers and stood there,Say Anythingstyle, refusing to leave. So Ashley dragged him to a coffee shop—out of pity—to explain how hopeless I was. “He just seemed so lovelorn,” she explained, “clutching those sad carnations.” She also thought he was “kind of cute.” And it wasn’t his fault, she liked to say, that he was “collateral damage” from my “issues with intimacy.”
