Chapter 17: Rehearsal Dinner

"I'll be there," I told Margaux. "I'll bring a mop."

Her smile slipped for half a second.

Then she turned on her heel and filmed herself walking away.

The wedding party took over the Sea Cliff for a week.

They tracked sand through my lobby and left wet towels on my heart-pine floors.

A groomsman threw up in the bridal suite's fireplace. The housekeeper made him clean it with a toothbrush.

Honora arrived on Wednesday and took the best room on the sea side.

She never once looked at me. She looked through me, like I was a window she'd paid for.

Brennan barely came out of his room.

The rehearsal dinner was Friday night, June nineteenth, on the long glassed-in porch.

Sixty guests at one long table, white candles, peonies Margaux had flown in from Holland.

I was not a guest.

I was the designer on duty, in black jeans and a white shirt, standing by the porch doors with a radio clipped to my belt.

Corbin was not a guest either.

Honora had taken his name off the list.

He came anyway, in a dark suit, and stood beside me by the doors with his hands in his pockets.

"You don't have to be here," I said.

"I'm the groom's uncle."

"Half."

"The half that stays."

I bumped his shoulder with mine.

They served the lobster. They served the wine.

Margaux's father, a big red-faced man with a booming laugh, gave a toast about shipping containers that nobody understood.

Then Margaux stood up with her glass.

She was in white silk. She'd had her hair done in long glossy waves.

Her phone was propped against a candlestick, recording.

"I just want to say thank you," she said, in her soft camera voice. "To everyone who came all this way. To Honora, my second mother."

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