Chapter 10: Number One

I didn't turn my head.

I kept my eyes on the folder and my hands flat on the table.

"Then he should have told me," I said, at a normal volume. "It would have saved my parents a lot of flowers."

Jade straightened up fast and swung herself out of the room.

I made it all the way to the street before my knees went soft.

My father held my elbow and said nothing at all until we were in the cab.

On Saturday Finn took Robbie and me sailing.

The boat was a twenty-two-foot daysailer his uncle had left him, white with a blue stripe, moored at a little yacht club in Dorchester.

Robbie wore a life jacket over his club T-shirt and gave orders like an admiral.

"Ready about. Audrey, that means duck."

I ducked.

The boom went over my head with a whoosh, and Robbie nodded at me.

We went out past Castle Island into the harbor.

Robbie fell asleep on a cushion in the bow with his glasses pushed up on his forehead.

Finn handed me the tiller.

"Keep the wind on your left cheek. If it goes weird, yell."

"Weird how?"

"You'll know."

He sat beside me on the bench.

His knee was against mine, and neither of us moved it.

"You're quiet," he said. "Since Wednesday."

So I told him.

About the whisper at the deposition.

About wedding number one, the hotel ballroom on Park Avenue, two hundred guests, a string quartet.

How I'd stood in the dress at the window of the bridal suite at noon, watching for his car.

How the phone rang, and he said, "She needs me, Aud, she could have died," and I said okay.

How I took off the dress myself, because I'd sent the planner home, and couldn't reach the last three buttons.

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