Chapter 10
ELIAS
The eleven o'clock ferry brought the supplier's second pallet, a crate of champagne, four late guests, and Celeste Duverney in white linen, holding a leather folio like a diplomatic pouch.
I was on the dock because the pallet was on the manifest. She was on the dock because her father performs sentimental about signatures and is surgical about everything else, and the Ravndahl–Duverney joint venture renews annually the first week of summer, and I had let the paperwork sit in my inbox for nine days, and somewhere on the mainland a man who has called me son more warmly than my father ever has decided the documents should travel by daughter.
"Elias." She came down the gangway like the boat had been beneath her.
Sunglasses up into her hair. Smile calibrated to old friends, which we have never been.
"Don't look so happy. I'm here for the wedding: Lauren invited Daddy months ago, he can't travel in this heat, I'm the family's regrets. The renewal just makes it efficient."
"The renewal could have been a courier."
"A courier can't dance." She surveyed the island over my shoulder (the lawns, the pavilion, the money), pricing it, the way she prices rooms. "Besides, I haven't seen everyone in years.
Is it true the sister's doing the cake? After the mainland one died in transit? God. Weddings. It's always the sister."
She says the sister like a category. I took the folio because my hands are easier to trust than my mouth, and told her the welcome desk would sort her cottage, and watched her not leave.
"You look well," she said. Lower. The calibration shifting. "You always look well. It's very annoying, you know, how the years just—" her hand sketched me, top to bottom, proprietary "—cooperate."
"The desk is that way, Celeste."
"Mm." She smiled like I'd paid her a compliment.
With Celeste, refusal has always been received as foreplay: years of declined dinners, unanswered messages every eighteen months or so, a hand on my sleeve at exactly one charity auction per year, all of it filed by her under delay.
Her father wants the ledgers married. She wants the thing she was promised at some table I wasn't at.
Neither of them has ever asked what I want, which is fair.
Neither have I. There's exactly one item on that list and it isn't available and the list doesn't update.
She went up the dock. I stood with the folio and did not open it, because the pallet needed the walk-in, because Curro was waving, because the week had a schedule and Celeste Duverney was not on my column of it.
That held for six hours.
At dinner, family table, low-key, everyone half-dead from the sun, she appeared in the seat across from me with a glass of something pale and her regrets deployed charmingly to Lauren, who accepted them because Lauren is gracious and because Duverney opens doors on the mainland that a wedding planner can't. Theo gave me one look across the table, the old look, the one that means steady.
My best friend doesn't know what happened, but he has watched Celeste orbit me for a decade and has a whole vocabulary of eyebrows about it.
She was good all dinner. And then Hallie came through the pavilion (not even to the table; she cut across the far side with Jenna, laughing at something, sunburnt, carrying the day the way she carries everything, at full volume), and I watched her go the way I always do.
I know I did. I know exactly what my face doesn't do, and what it costs to keep it not doing that, and I paid it, the way I've paid it in every room.
But years of watching me price rooms taught Celeste to read a ledger too.
When I looked back, she was studying me over her glass. Not hurt. Interested. The way her father looks at a term sheet when he's found the clause everyone else missed.
"Huh," said Celeste Duverney, softly, to nobody, and filed it.
I signed nothing that night. I left the folio where it landed instead of straightening it, a small sovereignty, and stood at the window doing the week's arithmetic with new numbers in it. The wedding bearing down. Celeste on an island with one bar, one terrace, one kitchen with the lights on late.
The last time the three of us stood inside the same walls, there was a door that didn't latch.
I checked my own door twice, and went to bed, and did not sleep.