Her eyes were wet and gray and wide, and for one second, she didn't have a wall up. Then it came back. She looked away. She wiped her cheek with the heel of her hand, fast, like she was brushing off a fly.
I looked at the chairs.
Astrid got three words into her vow.You came back.That was all she managed before she put her hand on the side of Easton's face and said it again, steadier, and the yard went so quiet I could hear the river past the back fence.
I was proud of him. That was the thing I kept coming back to, standing beside him at the arch while the kiss happened and the yard came apart. A year of watching him go quiet. And now he was crying in front of two hundred people, and the man at the arch was the version of Easton Ford I'd always known was in there.
The toast lasted fifteen minutes.
I'd been making notes for three months, which was three months longer than any toast needed, but I'd wanted to get it right. The pinball machine in my basement. The morning he'd confessed at the firehouse counter that there was somebody. The cat in the engine compartment. Opening day at the clinic.
I landed on the line I'd been saving for the end.
"I have never seen a man pretend not to be in love harder than Easton Ford, and I have never seen a man fail at pretending faster."
The backyard came apart. Easton shook his head. Astrid was laughing and crying at the same time. I raised my glass.
I looked at Audrey as I brought it down.
She was already looking at me. She had her glass up, her eyes were dry now, and the half-smile was back. She held my look over the rim for a count of two before she drank. It wasn't an invitation. It wasn't a challenge. It was something I didn't have a word for yet, and by the time I thought to look again, she was already turning to say something to Sloane.
The reception settled into the rhythm of receptions after the toasts and the first dance, and the mother of the bride's crying jag had all been absorbed by the evening. The bartender knew his business. The band had shifted into the low, warm gear that kept people on the patio without demanding anything of them.
Shane, Brian, and Garrett found me at the bar around eleven.
"Rhodes."
"Briggs."
"You're not on the dancefloor."
"Nobody's asked me."
"Mhm." Shane took a pull of his beer. "You've been watching somebody for twenty minutes."
"I've been watching the bartender. He's pouring light."
"That's not who I mean."
Brian coughed into his glass of water in a way that wasn’t a cough. Garrett smiled into his bourbon.
"Go talk to her," Shane said.
"I've been talking to her for three months. She thinks I'm rude."
"Are you rude?"
"Frequently."
"Go be rude to her, then."
I finished my drink and left the three of them at the bar. The Queens wives were on the patio with Audrey, and the sound coming off that group was the sound of four women who had gotten past the polite stage and into the part of the evening where the real laughing started. Audrey was laughing harderthan I'd heard her laugh in three months. She had her head tipped back, her hand on Sloane's arm, laughing with the full-body commitment she brought to everything.
I noticed.
I didn't go over.
It’d gotten late.
