Chương 4
He simply looked tired.
For years afterward, Claire would remember that expression more clearly than the anger. It was the face of a man who had hoped two women would keep solving the consequences of his choices in different ways.
“I didn’t send the message,” Claire said.
Margaret’s eyes sharpened.
“No, you’re just making sure everyone suffers because you read it.”
Claire opened her mouth.
Ethan interrupted.
“Mom, stop.”
Margaret turned to him.
“Excuse me?”
“I said stop.”
Something fragile moved across her face.
Not hurt exactly.
Shock at disobedience.
“You are in this position because she—”
“No. I’m in this position because I sent the message.”
Claire looked at him.
Ethan rubbed his forehead.
“I shouldn’t have written it. I shouldn’t have talked about you like that. And the gifts thing—”
“That was me,” Margaret said quickly. “He never agreed.”
Claire picked up the phone.
She slid it across the desk.
Ethan’s final reply sat beneath his mother’s sentence.
I know.
Margaret looked away.
Ethan said, “I wasn’t agreeing to that part.”
“Then what were you agreeing to?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s convenient.”
“I was at work. She sent six messages. I said ‘I know.’”
Margaret said, “That’s exactly right.”
Ethan snapped, “Please stop helping me.”
Rachel pressed her lips together.
Claire looked at the ring on Daniel’s desk.
She had once loved Ethan’s inability to fake calm.
On their third date, a waiter had spilled sparkling water into his lap, and Ethan had laughed so hard the waiter began laughing too. When their flight to Boston was canceled, he had made friends with a retired science teacher at the bar and convinced Claire to rent a car for the drive.
He was good at motion.
Good at converting inconvenience into energy.
What he was not good at was sitting inside disappointment without finding someone to blame.
Claire had spent three years translating that flaw into words that sounded kinder.
Passionate.
Impatient.
Intense.
Protective.
The office door opened.
Daniel returned with a woman from banquet operations named Nina.
“We’ve stopped tomorrow’s additional prep,” he said. “Culinary is calculating what can still be canceled.”
Nina held a tablet against her chest.
“The florals are more complicated. They’re already delivered.”
“Donate them,” Claire said.
Everyone looked at her.
Nina asked, “All of them?”
“Anything the florist can’t take back.”
Margaret said, “Absolutely not.”
Nina looked at Claire.
“Donate them.”
“To where?”
Claire almost said she didn’t care.
Then she thought of two hundred white roses dying in a ballroom nobody would use.
“I don’t know. A hospital. Nursing homes. Whatever the florist normally does.”
Nina nodded.
“I’ll ask.”
Margaret stared at her.
“You would give away my flowers?”
Claire met her eyes.
“You can buy them.”
Margaret’s mouth closed.
Nina left.
The office seemed smaller.
Rachel sat on the edge of the filing cabinet beside the pothos and touched one of its brown leaves.
Ethan looked at Claire’s ring again.
“Can I talk to you outside?”
Claire did not answer immediately.
She wanted to say no.
She also wanted, with humiliating intensity, to hear something that would make the last forty minutes untrue.
Not an excuse.
An explanation so perfect it could reverse time.
She hated that part of herself.
“Five minutes,” she said.
Rachel opened her mouth.
Claire shook her head.
She and Ethan stepped into an empty service corridor behind the ballroom.
The walls changed there. No wallpaper, no framed prints, no polished sconces. Just gray doors, utility carts, stacked trays, and fluorescent lights.
A kitchen employee pushed a bin past them without looking up.
Ethan waited until he was gone.
Then he said, “I was going to call off the wedding.”
Claire folded her arms.
“When?”
“I don’t know.”
“Today?”
“No.”
“Yesterday?”
“Claire.”
“Before I paid the final balance?”
He looked at the concrete floor.
“I was scared.”
“Of me?”
“Of everything.”
She waited.
He shoved his hands into his pockets.
“I kept thinking I’d wake up and feel certain.”
“About marrying me.”
“Yes.”
“And you didn’t.”
“No.”
The honesty hurt more than denial.
Claire leaned back against the wall.
A door opened somewhere down the corridor, releasing a burst of kitchen noise, then swung shut.
Ethan continued.
“I love you.”
Claire looked at him.
He gave a miserable laugh.
“I know how that sounds.”
“Do you?”
“Yes.”
“You love me, but you planned to leave after the wedding.”
“I didn’t plan it like some scheme.”
“You discussed timing.”
“With my mother.”
“That makes it less planned?”
He rubbed his jaw.
“No.”
Claire looked toward the ballroom door.
“Why after?”
His silence answered first.
“Ethan.”
He swallowed.
“Because everything was already paid for.”
Claire felt something inside her go very still.
He rushed on.
“Not because I wanted your money. Because everybody was coming. My mother had been planning this for almost a year. You’d spent so much already. I thought canceling would waste all of it.”
“So you were going to marry me to avoid wasting the money I spent marrying you.”
“When you put it that way—”
“How else should I put it?”
“I was trapped.”
The word came out too quickly.
Claire stared at him.
Ethan heard himself.
“That’s not—”
“No. Keep going.”
“I felt trapped by the wedding. Not by you.”
“Who was paying for the trap?”
He looked away.
Claire laughed once, softly.
The sound surprised both of them.
Ethan stepped closer.
“I didn’t ask you for a hundred and eighty-six thousand dollars.”
“You asked me to marry you.”
“That’s not the same.”
“No.”
She nodded.
“It isn’t.”
He looked relieved too soon.
Claire continued.
“You asked me to trust you.”
His relief disappeared.
For three years Claire had thought Ethan’s worst habit was his temper.
Standing in the service corridor, she understood it was avoidance.
The temper was only what happened when avoidance stopped working.
“Did you ever tell your mother to stop asking me for things?”
He hesitated.
“That’s not fair.”
“There it is.”
May you like
“What?”
“Every time the answer is embarrassing, the question becomes unfair.”
