“You should get that as a tattoo,” Cooper said.
“Maybe I will.”
Could it be that simple? Had we just solved it?
I rolled back to study the ceiling again.
It was like that glorious feeling—my favorite feeling in the world—with a problem set in math where you’d spent days, and weeks, and study sessions, trying to fit the pieces together… and then they clicked into place.
And then Cooper started singing, like we’d done so many times: the sweetest, saddest song, written to a love who now belonged to somebody else, leading up to his favorite line:
But tonight,
You belong to me.
He hadn’t even hit the wordtonightbefore I jumped in, too, and byyou belong to me,we were fully harmonizing like we’d never stopped.
He’d started with my part, the melody, so I just did his harmony—as easy as breathing.
I guess it really was that simple.
And that’s how we finally drifted off to sleep, at last.
We lay in Cooper’s bed, divided by a wall of pillows, as we churned across the moonlit surface of a deep ocean… and we sang ourselves to sleep.
Fourteen
BREAKFAST THE NEXTmorning wasn’t just breakfast, by the way. It was a matchmaking event with its own subsection on the spreadsheet.
That was my whole reason for going to breakfast: to get back on track and right my course with Finn.
But breakfast somehow wound up being about anybody—and everybody—butFinn.
Ashley had reserved a group of dining tables for the wedding guests, but she’d put place cards at only one: the hookup table for all the bridesmaids, the groomsmen, and theone sisterwho needed love connections.
Should I have been seated next to Finn at breakfast?
One hundred percent.
Ashley had drawn a seating chart: with me flanked by Finn on one side and my wingman, Cooper, on the other. This was the backbone of Operation Conquest: proximity and charm. Ashley’s job was to make sure that Finn was seated next to me at everything, and my job was to be relentlessly delightful.
Foolproof, Ashley insisted.
Except that Finn decided to be late, leaving an opportunity for Grandma Dodie to show up in a turquoise pashmina, fully ignore all the place cards, and plunk right down in his seat.
Cooper looked at me, likeWhat now?
And I looked at him back, likeThis lady can sit anywhere she wants.
At that, Cooper moved to Grandma Dodie’s other side, leaving his seat open for Finn, and charmed her so aggressively that, at one point, I heard her say, “I just don’t remember you being this handsome.”
To which Cooper replied, “Well, I’ve been working on it.”
Meanwhile, I restored order by switching Finn’s and Cooper’s place cards and draping a napkin over Finn’s new chairback—trying to emphasize howvery takenthat seat was.
As Cooper asked Grandma Dodie all about her Spanish lessons, and the pastry-making class she was taking, and her upcoming trip to Barcelona, I kept the hostess podium in my sights, waiting for Finn to appear.
But no luck.
