“Well...?”
“It was an email from Juliana George. She’d seen the announcement somewhere—this is Taylor Buchanan, you know, so this wedding was a Big Deal. The wedding had its own Instagram account.”
“And what was in the email?”
“What was in the email was Juliana asking David not to marry Taylor.”
Nicola whistles. Well, she can’t actually whistle, so she makes sort of a puffing sound, and she says, “This is what she told you at her party?”
He nods. “This is what she told me.”
“So what happened between the email and the wedding?”
“Took me a while to get to sleep, is what happened.”
She rolls her eyes. “What happened with David?”
Jack put a tall glass of water and four Advil by the bed, and sometime in the night David must have gotten up, because by the time Jack woke the glass was empty and the Advil were gone and David had changed from his rehearsal dinner clothes into an ancient T-shirt that readTOM AND BILL: THE FURNITURE BROTHERS, with cartoon renderings of his dad and Nicola’s dad on it.
(Nicola has the same shirt.)
“He was fresh as a daisy,” says Jack.
“And did you talk about the night before?”
“I brought it up.” He strokes his chin when he says this. Somehow this is at once an old-man gesture and also unbearably attractive.“But honestly, I’m not sure if he would have, on his own. He was acting like nothing had happened.”
“How’d you bring it up?”
“I just asked him. I said, ‘Do you love Taylor?’”
“Simple, yet direct,” Nicola says. “Approved. What’d he say?”
The bartender comes back and nods at Jack. “Another Dark ‘N’ Stormy?”
“Why not?” says Jack. “I’ve got nowhere to be.” It was true: he had nowhere to be that day, nor the next one, nor the next one after that.
“You?” she says to Nicola. “Another Mudslide?”
She shakes her head. “Still working on this one.” Then, to Jack: “So what’d David say? When you asked him if he loved Taylor?”
“He said, ‘Of course I love her, you asshole. I’m marrying her, aren’t I?’”
Nicola sits with that for a moment, and then she asks, “Do you think he forgot, about the email and everything? Or do you think he was pretending?”
Jack looks pensive. He narrows his eyes and looks skyward. “I’m not sure,” he says slowly. “It was alotof bourbon.”
“Well, did you talk about it again?”
“Not a word. Never mentioned it, either of us. We had breakfast with the other groomsmen, as planned. Played nine holes of golf—as planned.”
“Did you win?”
“Of course I won.”
“And then what?”
“At five that evening, David married Taylor.” That part Nicola remembers herself: she was there. “Next thing I knew I was getting a baby announcement for little Felicity there,” says Jack. “And I didn’t give another thought to any of it until this summer, when I made the connection betweenthatperson and the person throwing these parties everyone is talking about.”
