Down Bad For My Fake Boo

1. Hallie

HALLIE

The text arrives while I'm shelving the new biography section, and I make the rookie mistake of opening it immediately.

My phone screen lights up with a photograph that might as well be a declaration of war. Head Table Seating Chart reads the header in my sister Madison's loopy handwriting, complete with little hearts dotting the i's because of course there are hearts. Everything Madison touches gets hearts.

I zoom in on the diagram, hoping I've misread it. Praying, really, to whatever patron saint oversees unfortunate seating arrangements.

Nope. No such luck. There it is, written in purple gel pen with Madison's characteristic flourish, a little arrow even connecting the names like we're paired up for some cosmic three-legged race: Hallie Miller & Kyle Wark.

The letters seem to pulse on my phone screen, mocking me. I blink hard, willing them to rearrange themselves into different names. Any other names. But they stay stubbornly the same, the purple ink practically cheerful in its permanence.

The phone slips through my fingers. I catch it against my stomach, which is currently attempting to escape through my esophagus.

Kyle. Kyle Wark. My ex-boyfriend Kyle, who I haven't spoken to in almost two years, not since he dumped me over FaceTime while standing in front of the Trevi Fountain. He'd been wearing a linen shirt I'd bought him for his birthday. The memory makes my molars grind together.

"Find yourself," he'd said, like he was the protagonist of some indie film instead of a guy who worked in corporate insurance and thought Olive Garden was "authentic Italian."

And now he's the Best Man. Madison's fiancé Trevor's college roommate, apparently. Small world. Tiny, suffocating world. I mean… they were roommates. I guess I just selfishly assumed that—in this case—my mental health would take precedence over an obvious choice for best man.

I was the one whose heart was cruelly stomped on after all.

But… I guess when it comes to wedding planning? There’s no crying in baseball.

I slide down the Biography shelf until I'm sitting on the industrial carpet, knees pulled to my chest. The air in this section always smells like old paper and lemon Pledge, usually comforting. Right now it feels like the walls are closing in.

My phone vibrates in my hand, the buzz traveling up my arm like an electric shock.

The screen lights up with another incoming text from Madison, her contact photo, us at the beach last summer, both grinning with ice cream cones, flashing cheerfully at me.

I almost laugh at the irony. That was before everything got complicated, when weddings seemed like distant, dreamy things that happened to other people.

I don't want to look. Every instinct I have is screaming at me to just put the phone down, to shove it in my cardigan pocket and pretend the notification doesn't exist. But my thumb is already moving, already swiping, already opening the message before my brain can catch up and stop it.

Isn't this PERFECT??? You two can finally talk things through! I'm such a good sister

I look at the message until the words blur together, the tiny heart emoji swimming in and out of focus like it's mocking me.

Perfect. She thinks this is perfect. My wonderful, well-meaning, completely oblivious sister thinks trapping me in a church pew next to my ex-boyfriend for an entire ceremony, plus cocktail hour, plus dinner, plus whatever mortifying wedding games she's probably planned, is some kind of romantic intervention worthy of a hallmark movie.

The hyperventilating starts somewhere around the third read-through, when the reality of what "finally talk things through" actually means begins to sink in.

My chest tightens, and suddenly the Biography shelf and the Reference section feels about as wide as a coffin.

I can hear my own breathing getting shorter, faster, more ragged with each passing second.

"Breathe," I mutter to myself, pressing my forehead against my knees. "Just breathe. It's one day. Six hours maximum. You can survive six hours."

My phone rings a third time against my palm, the vibration sharp and insistent. I glance down at the screen, expecting another message from Madison, maybe an apology or a voice memo trying to explain her reasoning, and the notification banner appears.

Not Madison.

It's Instagram. A notification that Kyle has posted a new photo. Kyle, who hasn't posted anything in months. Kyle, who I should have unfollowed the moment we broke up but couldn't bring myself to because that felt too final, too much like admitting defeat.

I should delete the app. I should throw my phone into the book return slot and let it get crushed with the overdue Danielle Steel novels. Instead, I tap the notification like I'm defusing a bomb I know is going to explode anyway.

The photo loads in crisp, perfect resolution.

Kyle, tanned and stubbled in that effortlessly European way that Americans can never quite pull off, has his arm around a woman who looks like she wandered off a Versace runway and accidentally ended up in his camera roll.

She's all legs and cheekbones and the kind of casual elegance that makes my vintage cardigan collection feel like a cry for help.

The caption reads: When in Rome...

My stomach does something complicated that involves several internal organs rearranging themselves.

"Okay," I whisper to myself in the empty aisle. I squeeze my eyes shut behind my glasses, trying to will away the image that's now burned into my retinas. "Okay. This is fine. Everything is totally, completely fine."

The lie tastes bitter on my tongue, but I keep repeating it anyway, like if I say it enough times it might actually become true.

I try to stand up. My legs have other ideas. They've gone numb from sitting cross-legged, and I stumble forward into the shelf, which wobbles ominously.

The display. Oh god, the display, my beautiful, painstakingly arranged display.

I'd spent two hours this morning arranging the new romance novel releases on the endcap. Artfully stacked pyramids of shirtless men and windswept heroines, organized by heat level and color coordination. It was beautiful. Was.

The first book tips. Then another. Then the entire carefully constructed tower collapses in a cascade of glossy covers and broken spines, hitting the floor with a sound like thunder in the library's usual silence.

I stand frozen in the wreckage, a hardcover copy of The Duke's Forbidden Touch lying open at my feet, its pages bent at an angle that would make any librarian weep.

"Shit," I breathe. Then louder, because apparently today is the day I completely unravel. "Shit, shit, shit."

"That's..." He pauses, tilting his head as he surveys the carnage spread across the floor. "That's a whole lot of shirtless dukes you've got there."

The voice comes from behind me. Deep, amused, with that particular roughness that sounds like it was aged in whiskey barrels.

I don't need to turn around to know who it is. My body knows before my brain catches up, going hot and cold and tingly in all the places that have no business being tingly in the Biography section.

Caius O'Connor leans against the opposite shelf, arms crossed over his chest. He's wearing his usual uniform of dark jeans and a t-shirt that's seen better days, grease stains on the hem.

His hair falls into his eyes the way it always does, like he's allergic to barbers. The crooked grin is already forming.

Behind him, my brother Ryan hefts a box of donated books, barely glancing at the carnage. "Hal, we're here for the heavy stuff. Where do you want it?"

"Breakroom," I manage, crouching to gather the scattered novels. My face burns. "Just. The breakroom is fine."

Ryan nods and disappears around the corner, but Caius doesn't move. He's watching me with those dark eyes that always seem to see more than I want them to.

"Need some help there?" His voice carries that thread of amusement.

"I'm fine." The words come out sharper than intended, defensive in a way that probably broadcasts exactly how not-fine I am.

"Yeah, sure looks like it." He gestures at the disaster zone surrounding me, the sweep of his hand taking in the scattered books, my defeated posture, the general chaos of my existence. "You're sitting in the midst of a pile of porn."

"It's not porn," I snap, clutching a book with a particularly enthusiastic cover to my chest like it might shield me from his knowing grin. "It's romance. There's a very distinct difference between the two."

"Yeah?" He picks up the nearest book, flipping it open to a random page. His eyebrows climb toward his hairline. "This scene involves a carriage and some very creative use of?—"

I snatch the book from his hands. "Don't you have an engine to rebuild or something?"

"Probably." But he crouches down anyway, starting to stack the books with surprising care. His hands are clean today, mostly, though there's still grease under his fingernails that never quite comes out. Mechanic's hands. Strong and careful and?—

Stop. Stop thinking about his hands. Stop cataloguing the way they move, capable and certain. Just stop.

"So," he says casually, too casually, in that way that tells me he's noticed far more than I want him to.

"You gonna tell me why you're having a complete breakdown in the Biography section of all places?

I mean, if you're going to have a crisis, at least do it somewhere more interesting. The romance section, maybe."

"I'm not having a breakdown." The protest sounds weak even to my own ears, especially when I'm literally surrounded by evidence to the contrary.

"Uh huh." He hands me a stack of five books, perfectly aligned. "You just decided to redecorate with falling objects. Very feng shui."