Page 8 of Seven Rules for Breaking Hearts

Our resort was perched in the foothills that led up into the highlands of Catalina, so it wasn’t quite seaside, but the smell of salt and sand wafted on a light breeze. Below, the streets were dotted with colorful rooftops, tiny golf carts and electric bicycles weaving between them. There were few cars on the island. Beyond Avalon, the deep blue Pacific stretched back toward the mainland. I kept a safe distance from the railing. I was never quite comfortable with heights. But a small cast-iron table and chairs were butted up against the white stucco with a fresh arrangement of white lilies, making for a photogenic nook to enjoy coffee or breakfast.

The only downside was the twin balcony right next to mine, though it was mercifully empty at the moment. I stepped back inside and shut the sliding glass door, shooting Jo a quick text before jumping in the shower.

Margo: Dress code for tonight?

I let the warm water rush over me, easing some of the tension of the last couple days. Maybe my defensiveness toward Dec-

lan was misdirected. He was just another reminder of a past I would’ve preferred to forget—a past it felt I couldn’t escape, as of late.

I had scrubbed on my hands and knees to wipe the slate clean after a lackluster high school career. And I’d done a damn good job of it. Our podcast had an average of a couple hundred thousand monthly listeners. I’d done more than reinvent myself; I’d built a foundation for a potential long-term career. A future that was well outside the shortsighted expectations everyone had placed on me. For a while, it felt like I’d made a clean break—from the past, from our hometown, from everything I didn’t particularly care to look back on.

But then last spring we got invited to Marketing & Mimosas, a social networking brunch out in Cathedral City, where we ran into the blogger and style consultant behind the popular Instagram page Autumn’s Closet. Jo had suggested we do a bit of cross-promotion, and before I knew what was happening, a collaboration had evolved into a friendship. Turned out, Autumn just happened to be Peter Figueroa’s younger sister. Someone threw Autumn a twenty-first birthday party at this intimate speakeasy in the Fashion District of Downtown L.A., where Jo bumped into Peter, and the rest was history. She’d picked at a loose thread, tugged a little too hard, and started the slow unraveling of four years’ worth of work.

By the time I stepped out of the shower, Jo had texted back.

Jo: Cute, but not too dressy. I’m thinking maybe that floral print dress I wore at the resort in Cabo last year?

Okay, I could work with that. I slathered on some lotion and blow-dried my hair. My roots were showing and the green had started to fade to a strange mossy color, like it had forgotten what color it was supposed to be in the first place. It felt brittle as I worked out the tangles with a comb—probably needed a break from the years of abusive bleaching and coloring, but the green had become one of the more recognizable elements of my online presence, so I’d have to touch it up sooner or later. I selected a cotton dress with a low-cut back and paired it with chunky sandals. Not too dressy, not too casual. Then a dab of cream blush and a flick of mascara, and I was ready to go.

The Bluewater Grill was a pier-side restaurant with outdoor seating, and the hostess’s heeled steps echoed off the wood planks as she led us to a table for four overlooking Avalon Bay. It was murky in the fading sun, the lights of the city dancing on the gentle, lapping waves between the yachts and private sailboats—some of them vacant, others lit a bright yellow from within, their occupants drinking on the stern and kicking their feet in the dark water. Jo sat next to Peter, which placed me on the opposite side of the table, elbow-to-elbow with Declan. Our waiter materialized before we managed to exchange any snide remarks.

Jo ordered a glass of sauvignon blanc and Peter a beer, but I decided to steer clear of alcohol—at least for the first night. I wasn’t sure I’d recovered all the brain cells I lost at The Blue Room the other night, and our sponsors were often more than happy to ply us with drinks without my helping matters along. “Just a water, please.”

“Same for me,” Declan said. I glanced at him sidelong. He’d changed into a navy short-sleeved button-down for dinner and smiled when he caught me looking at him—a small, polite smile that emphasized his dimple. I pretended to read the menu, even though I’d already decided I was going to order the salmon.

There was a lot of small talk about how nice the hotel was and how generous our sponsor had been, during which Jo seemed to be doing most of the talking. Despite my best efforts to be present, I couldn’t help feeling a little distracted. Generous wasn’t the word I would use, because when it came to sponsors, we always owed them something in return—a balancing of the scales. Which more often than not translated into numbers: impressions, engagement, click-throughs, and all of that required content.

Once the drinks had arrived and we’d all ordered our food, Jo steered the conversation toward the wedding. “We have two weeks to get everything organized—”

“—with plenty of time to party it up in between,” Peter interrupted, clinking a glass of pilsner with Declan’s water and waggling a mischievous eyebrow. I could have gagged.

Jo carried on unaffected. “The rest of the bridal party will arrive tomorrow, and they can help. The venue, florist, and caterer are already set up. We still need to do cake tasting, the bachelor and bachelorette parties, the rehearsal dinner, and the actual wedding.”

Already my head was spinning, trying to map out a half-coherent schedule. Jo was a planner at heart. She was the one who wrote out the outlines for each season of the podcast and drafted up our social media calendar each month. I was more improv. Composing Tweets on the fly. That sort of thing. We balanced each other out.

But with the wedding and all its obligations, I thought it might be good for me to pick up some of the slack. “What about social media?” I asked. “The marketing team at Castaway Catalina are asking for a minimum of five Instagram posts, and that’s not even touching on their plans for TikTok—”

Jo waved a hand like my concerns about our reputation were smoke she could waft away. “We’ve got two weeks for all that.” She pointed her straw at Declan. “I wanted to touch on whatever you’re planning for the bachelor party real quick …”

I dug my phone out of my pocket and opened our collaborative social media calendar beneath the table. Jo had already marked dates for various posts in July, so maybe she was more on top of things than I thought.

“So long as it’s not the night before the wedding,” she was saying. “I’m planning the rehearsal dinner that night.”

“And Pete will need a couple days to recover,” Declan added.

“You’re one to talk,” Peter shot back.

By the time one of the food runners delivered our plates, he was in the middle of regaling us with a very run-of-the-mill story about how Declan passed out on the floor of his bathroom after killing a bottle of Bacardi in high school. I mostly tuned it out, focusing on my dinner: a mouthwatering crispy salmon with asparagus. Declan sawed a knife through his steak, bumping elbows with me in the process. To ensure he didn’t mistake it for an intentional elbow graze, I tucked my arms in and tried to pretend he didn’t exist.

We’d finished dinner and I was on my third glass of water when Jo produced her three-ring binder from somewhere in her bottomless tote. “I’ve printed sheets with info about some of our guests, to help you remember who’s who,” she explained, because of course she had. She popped open the metal rings of the binder and extracted two pages, which she passed across the table like they were copies of the syllabus on the first day of class.

It was a lengthy list of names with brief descriptions, including how they knew the bride and groom. Aside from parents and other immediate family members, it listed off the members of the wedding party: five in all, two groomsmen and three bridesmaids, including me and Declan. I scanned over the list. I’d met both of my fellow bridesmaids in the past, but I lingered on the name of the other groomsman. I knew that name, but not because of any high school bullying. I’d heard it on TV. On the cover of gossip rags at the grocery store checkout. Occasionally trending on local Twitter.

“Lucas Montpelier?” I read off. Under relation to bride and groom, the only explanation offered was groom’s childhood friend. “As in Senator Montpelier’s son?”

“Tony used to work with my mom,” Peter explained. “Lucas and I went to the same daycare, when we were little.”

Carol Montpelier was a U.S. senator from our hometown. On the national level, she was a politician, but locally, she was more of a celebrity. Her husband, Tony, was a well-liked local news anchor, and had recently and very publicly filed for divorce after the senator was caught having an affair; my mom had followed the story obsessively, updating me during our weekly phone calls in meticulous detail.