15. Stephanie
— ? —
Stephanie
I couldn’t do it.
The ferry left at ten. I knew this because I’d looked it up three times, memorized the dock location, and mentally packed my bags twice over.
All I had to do was make it through the day, say my goodbyes, and escape back to my safe, Kevin-free life.
That was the plan. That had been the plan since I’d woken up that morning with the imprint of his mouth still burning on my skin and the cold sense that I’d let the weekend get away from me.
But every time I tried to focus on leaving, my brain betrayed me with images from this morning. His hands on my waist. His breath on my ear. The desperate way he’d said my name, low and unguarded, before I’d remembered all the reasons I wasn’t supposed to want to hear it anymore.
I had thought about Kevin every moment of the day.
I’d thought about him during the mimosa toast and the croquet game nobody understood the rules to, thought about him while I pretended to admire Tris’s rose garden.
And by the looks he kept shooting me across the party, the quick ones he thought I didn’t catch, I wasn’t the only one thinking.
“And then he had the AUDACITY to demand she pay him for quote unquote mental repairs.”
I blinked. Harry was sitting next to me on one of the deck chairs, gesturing wildly with her wine glass, red sloshing dangerously close to the rim. I’d apparently missed several minutes of conversation.
“Wait, what?”
“The husband. In my case. He cheated on his wife for two years, she finally leaves him, and now he’s claiming she owes him compensation because HE was emotionally damaged when she walked out.
” Harry took an aggressive sip of wine. “Because apparently being abandoned was traumatic for him. The man who abandoned his marriage vows every Tuesday and Thursday with his secretary.”
“How DARE he,” I said, shaking my head.
The irony wasn’t lost on me. Here I was, sitting beside my ex-husband’s sister, listening to a story about a man being punished for absence while the man who’d left me alone in the worst hour of my life kept catching my eye across a lawn full of fairy lights.
I took a sip of my own wine and let the burn of it steady me.
“I KNOW RIGHT.” Harry leaned forward. “And his lawyer actually filed the motion with a straight face. I wanted to ask if they’d lost their minds or just their dignity.”
“Please tell me the judge laughed him out of court.”
“The judge’s exact words were ‘Mr. Patterson, this court does not award damages for the natural consequences of one’s own infidelity.’ I wanted to frame it.”
I laughed, and it felt good. Normal. This was what I needed.
Girl talk and wine and absolutely no thoughts about Kevin’s mouth or his hands or the way he’d bitten my earlobe this morning until I’d forgotten my own name.
Harry was safe. Harry had been my friend before she’d been my sister-in-law and had stayed my friend after she stopped being that, which was its own small miracle in a family this tangled.
“Come on, everyone! Time for the cake!”
Tris’s voice carried across the property, bright and excited. She was standing by the main patio, waving people over to a long table decorated with flowers and candles that flickered against the fading light.
Harry grabbed my arm. “Come on. Mom’s been planning this cake reveal for weeks. It’s apparently six tiers.”
“Six tiers? Who’s supposed to eat all that?”
“For the drama, Stephanie. For the drama.”
We made our way toward the gathering crowd.
The lawn had filled out as the afternoon slid toward evening, cousins and colleagues and neighbors I half-recognized all drifting the same direction.
Hugo appeared at my other side, sliding between me and Harry with the easy entitlement of a man who’d been cutting into my space since we were kids.
“I’ve barely seen you,” I told him. “Where have you been all day?”
He shrugged. “Sleeping, mostly. Some quality time with the pool and the bar.”
“Sounds like a productive weekend.”
“It’s called self-care. You should try it.”
“I’ve been trying it. It keeps getting interrupted by family drama.”
Hugo snorted. “Welcome to the Coleman experience.”
We gathered around Tris’s table. The cake was indeed six tiers, covered in elaborate sugar flowers and topped with a golden “60” that sparkled in the last of the light.
Tris was beaming, Lando had his arm around her, and the whole scene was so warm and unguarded that I felt a pang of longing for the marriage I’d once thought I was building.
Thirty-five years, and Lando still watched his wife with undimmed wonder.
I’d wanted that. I’d wanted it with my whole stupid heart.
Then Kevin walked up.
And tripped on a rock.
Not just any rock. The rock I had used to anchor the helium balloon bouquet I’d spent twenty minutes arranging this morning. The rock that was now rolling away as Kevin stumbled forward, arms flailing for balance he wasn’t going to find.
The balloons shot up into the sky.
“My balloons!” I gasped.
“Shit!” Kevin grunted.
He jumped. Actually jumped, launching straight up off both feet with his whole body extended, reaching for the trailing ribbons of the balloon bouquet. His fingers caught them, gripped tight.
Then he forgot to land.
He came down hard, momentum carrying him forward, and face-planted directly into a bank of hydrangeas.
The whole party went silent.
Kevin emerged from the bushes slowly. There were leaves in his hair. A scratch on his forehead. A smear of dirt across one cheek. And in his raised hand, held triumphantly overhead, the balloon bouquet.
I laughed so hard I had to sit down.
It just burst out of me, this hysterical, uncontrollable sound that made my stomach hurt and my eyes water.
I collapsed onto the nearest chair and watched Kevin extract himself from the hydrangeas with as much dignity as he could muster, which wasn’t much.
A petal clung to his jaw. He looked absurd and pleased with himself and thirty-five years old and eight years old all at once, and I hated how much I’d missed exactly this.
He caught my eye across the patio. And he smiled.
He didn’t look embarrassed or self-conscious. He gave me that crooked grin I used to love, the one that said he knew he was ridiculous and didn’t care as long as it made me laugh.
He tucked the balloon bouquet back into its holder, brushed a leaf off his shoulder, and turned to face the crowd.
“An applause for my wonderful mother, who’s turning sixty today!”
The tension broke. People started clapping, whistling. Someone whooped. Tris was shaking her head but she was laughing too, and when Kevin leaned down to kiss her cheek she swatted him fondly on the arm.
“My son, the graceful one,” she said into the microphone someone handed her. “Thank you all for being here. Now let’s sing before he knocks over the cake too.”
The singing was off-key and enthusiastic.
Tris blew out her candles in one long breath, and Lando kissed her temple, and the cake was cut and distributed on little gold-rimmed plates.
The party kicked into a higher gear after that, music starting up, people drifting toward the dance floor that had been set up on the lawn under a canopy of string lights.
I watched Kevin lead Tris out for the first dance. He was still picking leaves out of his hair, and she was still laughing at him, and they looked so happy together that my chest ached with a feeling I didn’t have a clean name for.
Hugo disappeared somewhere, probably back to the bar. Harry got pulled away by a cousin I didn’t recognize. I stood at the edge of the dance floor, alone, watching the party swirl around me and telling myself the ache in my chest was just the wine.
“May I have this dance?”
I turned. Lando was standing there with his hand extended, his smile warm and welcoming under the lights.
“I’d be honored.”
He led me onto the floor with the practiced ease of a man who’d been hosting parties for forty years. We fell into an easy rhythm, and he made me laugh with stories about Kevin as a child, about the time he’d tried to perform surgery on a stuffed bear and accidentally set it on fire.
“He’s always been intense,” Lando said. “Even as a boy. Once he decided he wanted something, nothing could stop him.”
“I remember.” I remembered too well. That intensity had been aimed at me once, and then it had been aimed away from me, at the clinic, at the numbers, at a future that hadn’t had room in it for the night I’d needed him most.
“He’s decided he wants you back, you know.”
I stumbled. Lando steadied me smoothly, one broad hand at my shoulder blade.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “That was blunt. Tris would tell me to mind my own business.”
“She’d be right.”
“She usually is.” He spun me gently, careful, giving me time. “But I’ve watched my son punish himself for three years, Stephanie. I’ve watched him tear his life apart and rebuild it piece by piece. And I’ve never seen him look at anyone the way he looks at you.”
Before I could respond, the music shifted. Partners switched, the crowd reshuffling around us in a wave of laughter and clumsy hand-offs. And suddenly Kevin was standing in front of me, Lando gone, the space between us gone with him.
We stared at each other.
The other dancers moved around us, pairing off, finding the beat. We stayed still, the only two people on that lawn not moving to the music.
“Hi,” he said.
“You’ve got hydrangea in your hair.”
Silence. Awkward, loaded silence that stretched too long.
I reached up without thinking and brushed his hair back from his forehead. There was a scratch there, red against his skin, still bleeding slightly where the hydrangea had caught him.
“You hurt yourself.”
He didn’t seem to breathe. “It’s okay. It doesn’t hurt.”
“That doesn’t mean the wound is not raw or bleeding.”
The words hung between us. They felt deeper than the wound I was examining, deeper than this moment and this party and this whole reckless weekend I should have skipped.