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We’re led to the tables where the silent auction will be held and start taping down bid sheets and setting up the displays. There are toddler ballet lessons and themed baskets. There are also trips, from the mundane—Napa bus tour—to a glamorous private home overlooking the Sea of Cortez, chef included.

We’re still there when the hotel staff come to set up the stage for the band and a parquet floor for dancing. Donna stands with Luke, fretting as she watches them. She calls me and Libby over. “Do you think it’s big enough? Thirty by thirty sounded big on paper but look at it.”

“Let’s see,” says Luke, pulling me by the hand.

I shouldn’t. I shouldn’t willingly let him grab my hand in public, much less dance with him, but he’s smiling in that way I can’t resist, and it’s all so effortless and easy. I’m like a bedsheet floating off a clothesline as he leads me across the floor. I could no sooner walk away from him now than that sheet could stop floating and fold itself into four square corners.

Libby grabs Donna and spins her too.

“He’s singing ‘Jingle Bells’,” I call over my shoulder to Libby and Donna. “I can’t believe you don’t know any other songs.”

“I know lots of other songs,” he argues before launching into “The Wheels on the Bus”, loudly. Donna starts to sing along, and Libby and I are laughing so hard we’re nearly bent over.

“You’re proven your point. We need a bigger floor,” says Hilary sharply, cutting into our silliness.

We stop dancing, still trying to control our giggling, and that’s when I see Grady. He’s standing by the ballroom doors with a garment bag over his shoulder, staring at me and Luke.

Me, wearing Luke’s sweatshirt.

Me, happy and flourishing.

I drop Luke’s hand fast, but not fast enough. The room is still freezing, but I can already feel the sweat trickling down my back.

32

THEN

JUNE 2015

I figured Harrison came from money, but I didn't know he came from this kind of money. His parents’ house, with its multi-million-dollar views of the Pacific and the cliffs, is the equivalent of three regular homes. It has a pool and two kitchens, two laundry rooms, and so many bedrooms that, though there are thirty of us, no one needs to sleep on the floor.

I haven’t seen Luke since the night of Danny’s proposal three months ago, when he watched me say, “Yes” in stunned silence. He was gone the next morning, before I woke.

I think he understood that I didn’t have a choice, that I couldn’t take one more thing away from them when they’d just lost so much, and he appears to have moved on just fine—he won a shortboard contest in La Jolla and finally secured enough major sponsors to go on the tour, though he nearly lost all of them when he got into a fistfight at the next competition.

I’m happy for him, but when I close my eyes, I still picture the plan we made: LA, living together, him coming in to see me at work every morning after a day of surfing, curling up next to me at night. We’d have been broke, the place would have been a dump, and I still can’t imagine anything better.

I spend a lot of time telling myself to stop imagining it, but this weekend is just going to make it harder.

The guys are on the deck discussing the storm coming in when Luke arrives. “There’s the hero of the hour!” Caleb booms, clapping him on the shoulder. “Nice work, man.”

Luke smiles and thanks him, but then his gaze lands on me with something bleak in his eyes that wasn’t there before. I was wrong, then, when I said he was doing just fine. He was reckless when he won at La Jolla. I wonder, now, if that’s my fault. I glance away, but not fast enough. Grady is watching, already angry. I still can’t believe Danny invited him after the way he acted at the funeral, but he’s always been better at forgiveness than I have, and as he pointed out—we couldn’t invite Libby without asking Grady too.

“How are the waves?” Luke asks.

“There’s no way, bro,” says Liam, nodding toward the churning ocean. It’s a small strip of beach, set between two cliffs, each of them littered with jagged rocks at the base. The break is far out, and the wind is pushing the waves hard to the south. Simply trying get out there would mean getting thrown into the rocks. “Maybe it’ll calm down a little tomorrow, but right now that’s a death wish,” Liam adds.

Luke continues to survey it, though, and my stomach drops. He is desperate to get away from me. I already knew I shouldn’t have come, but now, watching him, I’m certain this weekend was a big fucking mistake.

We all get settled into our rooms. Danny and I are given a master bedroom with a king-sized bed in honor of our upcoming wedding. We exchange an awkward glance as Harrison sends us in.

Currently, I share a bedroom with Donna, in the two-bedroom apartment we moved into after the church kicked them out of the house. I’ll switch over to Danny’s room when I become Mrs. Allen mere weeks from now, though I can’t begin to imagine what our nights will be like, with his mom sleeping across the hall. The situation is temporary anyway—a stopgap until we leave this fall. The church has agreed to let Donna set up an orphanage in Nicaragua. There have been objections to it, people lobbying the church not to send “hard-earned American dollars elsewhere”, and deep in my evil little heart I’m hoping they succeed. Because what am I qualified to do in Nicaragua? Nothing. So I’ll have to cook, clean, and do the laundry all day for the kids, and at night I’ll have to sit with Danny and Donna, pretending I’m grateful to God for letting me do it.

“The room is amazing,” Danny says to Harrison when we get back upstairs. “Way bigger than anything Juliet and I will ever have.”

Luke pales. Swallowing hard, he walks back to the sliding doors. “You ever try jumping off that?” he asks Harrison, nodding at the cliff to the south.

Harrison laughs. “No. I actually enjoy my life. I’d like it to continue.”