Chapter 3
HALLIE
My father was toasting the orange juice.
This is a real thing my family does. We toast everything: arrivals, departures, weather, a good parking spot.
By the time I got down to the breakfast terrace he was on his feet with a glass of juice raised to the first official morning of the best week of our lives, and eleven people said hear, hear over the pastry baskets, and my mother was already crying a little, at nine a.m., at juice.
"You missed the sunrise toast," Lauren told me, deadpan, sliding over so I could sit. "There was a sunrise toast."
"I heard it from my room. I raised my coffee. I participate in spirit."
The Larkspur does its breakfast on the long terrace over the water, all white linen and sea glare, and the family had colonized three tables' worth of it.
Aunts. A cousin fanning herself with a menu.
My mother in her element, which is any element containing all of her children plus staff to overtire.
I took a croissant from the basket and performed my professional inspection out of habit: decent lamination, underbaked by ninety seconds, they hold the shaping too tight.
It was fine. Fine is a strong word for what a croissant can be.
"Hallie, honey," my mother said, "did you see who's here?"
And there it went, the morning. Because of course I knew who was here.
I'd known for eight months, since Theo asked him in a group text that I was inexplicably included on, and I'd had eight months to build the week in my head the way you build a flight plan around a storm system.
What I had not built was him already at the far table in the sun, in linen, listening to my father with the particular stillness he has always had, the stillness of a man taking minutes for a meeting no one else knows is happening.
Elias looked up like I'd said his name. I hadn't. I have excellent control of his name.
"Hallie," he said, standing, because he stands, he's the last man in America who stands.
"Elias."
We did the thing. Twelve times now, in six years, I keep count, I have no idea why I keep count, it's not like there's a prize, twelve public performances of two adults who used to know each other: the half-hug with full daylight in it, one hand at my shoulder blade for the regulation duration, cheek near cheek, nobody's mouth anywhere.
We are very good at it. We could teach it as a seminar.
His hand landed and left like something clearing customs, and I smiled up at him with all my teeth and took my seat and buttered the underbaked croissant like it had personally wronged me.
He calls me Hallie now. It's correct, it's my name, and every time it lands like being addressed off my own driver's license.
"Doesn't he look wonderful," my mother said to me, not quietly.
"Wonderful," I said. He looked like the years had been drawn by an artist who liked him. It was honestly rude.
The thing you have to understand about breakfast is that it wasn't a minefield, it was a garden party held on a minefield by people who had never heard a click underfoot.
My family loves Elias Ravndahl. Not politely.
Structurally. My father talks portfolios with him like it's fishing.
My mother saves him the good jam. When he and Theo get going, and they got going, some bit about a hotel in Lisbon and a rental car the size of a shoe, the two of them landing lines on each other with the timing of men who've been double-acting since before I had a driver's license to be addressed off of, the whole terrace leans in like plants toward a window.
And I laughed. That's the part I'd tell you about if you asked, which no one ever has. It's a funny story and I laughed, and it cost me exactly what it costs every time, which is one small payment on a mortgage nobody knows I'm carrying.
Then Aunt Priss leaned across the fruit and said the thing somebody says every single time: "Elias. Handsome, successful, still single. Explain yourself."
The table did its warm little ohhh. Theo threw a grape at her. My mother said "Priss," in the voice that means keep going.
"No explanation would survive this audience," Elias said, easy, and everyone laughed, and he did not look at me, which is a thing you can feel, a not-look, it has a temperature.
"Well, somebody's going to get very lucky someday," said Aunt Priss.
"Somebody will," I said, and raised my juice to him, bright as brass. May she have a strong stomach and a good locksmith. "Hear, hear."
He held my toast for a second, glass to glass across the whole table, his eyes doing something I declined, with tremendous professionalism, to read, and my mother beamed at the two of us like the morning was going beautifully, because for her it was.
That's the trick of it. Nobody at that table was wrong to be happy.
I'd checked the math a long time ago and I re-check it every Christmas: their happiness runs on not knowing, the not knowing runs on me, and the overhead's mine to pay. Bakery margins taught me worse.
Lauren stood up with a stack of laminated cards.
My future sister-in-law laminated the wedding week. The Larkspur employs an events staff of nine; she'd interviewed all of them in a day and promoted them to audience. Each card had a name on it. Mine had a schedule that I read the way you read a biopsy result.
Welcome dinner: bridal party table. Rehearsal walkthrough: processional pairing: H. Cairn / E. Ravndahl. Beach day: team captains (H.C. / E.R.). Final brunch: I stopped reading.
"You two are paired for basically everything," Lauren said, with the serene cruelty of a woman in love. "Maid of honor, best man. That's just the architecture."
"The architecture," I said. Load-bearing, apparently. Me and the other beam.
"Is that okay?" she asked, and here's the thing about Lauren: she asked it lightly, but she looked at me while she did it, one beat too long, the way she measures a vendor.
I've wondered since exactly how much Lauren doesn't know.
She doesn't know anything. But she's the only one who's noticed there's something to not-know.
"It's your wedding," I said. "I'd pair with a heat rash for you."
"That's the spirit."
The ferry horn went off out on the water, one long note, the eleven o'clock, the island's whole concept of time, and I was up out of my chair before it finished, because there was exactly one person on that boat and she was mine.
Jenna came down the gangway in sunglasses the size of satellite dishes, dragging a suitcase that has been to four continents and never been checked, and she hugged me at the bottom of the dock like the ferry had been a rescue mission. Which, to be clear, it was.
"Report," she said into my hair.
"Family's lovely. Weather's a crime. The croissants are underbaked."
"And?"
"And nothing worth the ferry ride."
She pulled back and looked at me over the sunglasses, conducting her scan, Jenna has known me since we were nine; she can read my blood pressure off my part line, and then she looked up the lawn to the terrace, where the tables were breaking up, where Theo had his arm around Elias's shoulders and was steering him off toward the pavilion with the folder, laughing, best friends, thirty-one years, the whole postcard.
Jenna looked at Elias Ravndahl the way meteorologists look at a nice red swirl off the coast.
"Huh," she said. "It walks upright."
"Jen."
"I said huh." She took her sunglasses all the way off, which she does for weddings, funerals, and threats. "You know I keep tabs on my enemies. It's a hobby. Some people needlepoint."
"It's a week," I said. "I've done six years. A week is nothing."
"Mm," said Jenna, in the voice with a whole legal brief in it, and shouldered her bag, and took one more read of me: the part line, the grip on my keys, the smile I hadn't taken off from the terrace, which was starting to feel like a piece of formalwear at the end of a long night.
"Okay," she said. "But say the word."
She didn't say what word. She never has to.