Chapter 2 Hailey
Hailey
Hailey leaned against her Mazda Protegé in the sunny lot at the Portland bus station, biting her pinkie nail.
Damn it. She had to stop biting her nails. There would be hand photos for the wedding.
If there was a wedding.
All right, of course there was going to be a wedding, she thought. A glance at her oval solitaire diamond ring reminded her
of the reality, though the three-inch binder stuffed with contracts and samples and to-do lists currently in the trunk of
her car should have been enough.
She was just irritated that Noah wasn’t coming to her father’s birthday party tonight at The Cove. The date had been on the
calendar for months. Now he said he couldn’t get time off. “A Saturday night in July, babe? Seriously? When I’ve already put
in for our wedding two weeks from now?”
Hailey thought he should’ve made the party a priority.
It wasn’t every day her father turned fifty, and even though his actual birthday wasn’t till tomorrow—a smaller dinner with just family was planned—Noah wasn’t coming up then, either.
He worked three to eleven, the party and the dinner were both planned for five o’clock, and Summerland Cove was an hour and a half drive from Portland.
“So, no, I can’t just ‘pop in,’ ” he’d told Hailey.
The restaurant where he worked was called Bleu, for reasons unknown to Hailey. It was an “up-and-coming” place, according
to a review that had run last month in the Portland Press-Herald, which had also called it “intimate” and “pleasing.” It seated only thirty people at a time. Hailey had never eaten there;
it was booked out for months. Noah was the sous chef, underneath the head chef, Robin. They had no backup other than the horrible
“Alexandra,” whom Hailey had never met but who, according to Noah, would steal his job the second he showed weakness. Hence
why he could not take a night off for the party. “I’ll be lucky if I still have my job when I get back from our wedding, babe.”
Hailey had recently discovered that every Friday and Saturday night, Noah, Alexandra, and Robin all had drinks together after
work “to bond,” “to strengthen the team,” which explained why he often didn’t get home till after one a.m.—and was a bit drunk
when he did. Hailey did not like Alexandra, needless to say.
She’d only just learned about the late-night drinks because she had only moved in with Noah two weeks ago, after leaving behind
both her legislative aide job and the apartment in Augusta where she’d lived since finishing college two years ago. She’d
had it all planned out like clockwork: Move to Portland in early July, get settled in at Noah’s apartment before heading up
to Summerland Cove for Dad’s birthday party. Mostly hang out there for a full two weeks, both to make her mother happy and
to prep for the wedding. (Her mom had been making a huge deal about how this would be “the last summer for them all to be together” and had basically insisted that all the kids stay
the entire two weeks. Only Cody had been unable to get the time off work.)
So, Hailey would be at The Cove through Grandma and Grandpa’s anniversary party, then all the way through to her own wedding.
She and Noah would spend two nights in Bar Harbor for a “honeymoon”—he’d promised Bali when “things settled down a bit”—then head back to Portland, where Noah would go back to the grind at Bleu while Hailey started law school at the University of Southern Maine.
She didn’t think things would ever settle down a bit.
She knew she should be excited, but she’d been nauseous instead, barely able to eat, the entire last two weeks. Noah would
bring home extraordinary-looking leftovers from work, and she wouldn’t be able to stand even the smell of them. Her migraines
were worse than ever, too.
Biting her pinkie nail again, she decided maybe the problem was that Noah was just too good-looking now. He’d been squarely
in her league when they’d met, but, after moving to Portland, he’d started going to the gym six days a week and now bragged
he’d lost fifteen pounds of fat and gained thirty of “pure muscle.” It was hard to trust a man who looked like an underwear
model, even if you’d known him back when he didn’t.
Who was this Alexandra, anyway? Noah’d been working with her for a year. Why hadn’t he introduced her to Hailey?
Okay, well, probably because Hailey hadn’t been around. Finding time to spend together this past year had been a challenge,
between her working long hours during the week and his insane weekend schedule, plus the hour drive each way. Not to mention,
she’d been swamped with wedding to-dos! She and her mom had been working for a year off a seven-page checklist they’d grabbed
from the internet, marking each task with an H or an L to indicate which of them would run point. With the wedding now only two weeks out, they were down to the last page. Prepare toasts. Finalize shot list. Hair and makeup trial!
In other words, Hailey’s dedication to planning the moment when her life and Noah’s would become one had made him feel more
distant than ever.
Ironic.
On the bright side, Hailey had loved how happy planning the wedding seemed to make her mom—which was why she had told her
mom exactly zero percent of how she was feeling currently.
She was also not about to confess to her dad.
An unfortunate side effect of the wedding-planning madness (as her siblings had started calling it; Hailey didn’t know which of them had started it) was that she’d talked to her dad a whole lot less this past year.
The last time she’d called his cell, he’d answered with, “Hello, this is Wallet Central,” which made Hailey feel terrible, because it was true that every time she called she needed another check for another deposit (flowers, tents, chairs, officiant, caterer, DJ, the list went on).
Things would be crazy tonight—her mom said there were, like, a hundred people coming—but tomorrow Hailey would carve out some time to really talk with her dad, try to bridge the gap that had formed between them these past months.
She knew he’d just been joking with that wallet comment, and she missed him.
She glanced at her phone for the time. Shit, she thought. Where was Emma? Their mom was gonna kill them, if they were late for Dad’s party.
But when she looked up, there was her sister, strolling coolly out from the glass double doors of the station. Emma, good
New Yorker that she was now, was decked out head to toe in black—tank, short skirt, fishnet tights, combat boots—and, with
her petite frame, spiky dark, short curls, and tattooed little arms, she looked adorable, as ever. “Such a little pixie,”
their grandma always said of Emma, the implication (to Hailey) being that Hailey, at five foot nine, was gargantuan.
(“You just have bigger bones, like your grandpa!” Greta had told her, which hadn’t exactly helped.)
Suddenly feeling very Laura-Ashley-frumpy in her floral sundress from Gap, Hailey waved. “Emma! Hey!”
Emma nodded and gave a cool smile, then turned to a gangly, glamorous young woman with a curtain of straight black hair who
was walking just behind her, rolling a big metallic black suitcase. Emma said something to the woman, then reached for her
hand.
A ping of pain sounded in Hailey’s temple. She hadn’t heard anything about Emma bringing a guest. She didn’t even know Emma
was seeing anybody. And if Hailey hadn’t heard about it that meant their mom didn’t know, either.
Wait. Maybe they’d just met on the bus? Emma did work pretty quickly sometimes.
Either way. There was already barely room enough at Innisfree for everybody to sleep. And, while most of the family had grown used to never knowing who’d be the next romantic lead in the revolving-door drama
of Emma’s life, since Emma’d been bringing home girls and boys for years, Hailey was pretty sure that Grandma and Grandpa still didn’t know that Emma was bi. Sure, they’d probably
end up being fine with it, but it seemed like a lot to spring on a couple of octogenarians right when hundreds of people were
about to descend on them for Hailey’s mom’s crazy series of parties.
Emma, halfway to the car, stopped, turned, and stood on her tiptoes to kiss the woman, who passionately kissed her back—it
didn’t seem they had just met on the bus—and another problem dawned on Hailey. At Innisfree, she and Emma shared a bedroom.
The other two bedrooms, the ones that faced the water, were occupied by their parents and grandparents. Their brothers slept
in the attic. Grandma didn’t like for anyone to sleep on the couch in the living room, because she didn’t want “the peace
of my treasured early mornings” interrupted, so anyone who dared to, she’d shake awake at four a.m. or something ridiculous
to watch the sunrise with her.
That meant the only halfway reasonable alternative for sleeping was the room they referred to as “The Closet.” Next to the
girls’ room, it was windowless, with barely enough room to walk past the lumpy twin cot that was wedged inside.
Hailey had planned to ask Emma to sleep in there so she and Noah could have the girls’ bedroom. Now that they were only two
weeks away from getting married, this would surely be allowed? (Last summer, the one night Noah’d visited, Grandma had made
him sleep in The Closet, even though he and Hailey were already engaged. Emma had hounded Hailey relentlessly to sneak over
and join him, but Hailey hadn’t wanted to get in trouble with Grandma. “You are so lame,” Emma had declared, before flopping over and going to sleep.)
Come to think of it, maybe last summer’s debacle explained why Noah “couldn’t get off work.”
But now that he wasn’t coming, and Emma had brought this woman—whom Emma would probably pretend was “just a friend” to get past Grandma’s no-unmarried-lovers-in-the-house rule—no doubt Hailey would wind up relegated to The Closet.
She sighed. Still, she was happy to see her sister—it had been since Christmas—and, as Emma and the woman approached, holding
hands, Hailey moved forward, poised to reach out for a hug.
“Hey, Bridezilla,” Emma said, with an impish grin.
Hailey felt that like a jab to the stomach, but she laughed, hugged her, and said, “Hey, brat,” even as a weird certainty
dropped onto her with what felt like an actual thud: This weekend was not going to be anything like what she’d hoped.