He Dumped Me at Our Rehearsal Dinner, So a Man Twice My Age Took Me Home novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Toast
At the rehearsal dinner Whit ends the engagement in the middle of his toast, Belle drops her ring into his mother's wine glass in front of eighty guests, and at the bar a stranger lays a hotel key on the wood and she takes it herself.
Whit ended our engagement in the middle of his own toast, in front of eighty people.
He stood at the long table in the back room of the restaurant on Bull Street and tapped his glass with a fork.
The string quartet in the corner stopped in the middle of a bar.
"Thank you all for coming," Whit said.
"I owe you the truth, and I'd rather say it tonight than in the church tomorrow. There won't be a wedding."
Nobody made a sound.
Eighty faces turned to look at me.
I was holding a fork with a bite of crab cake on it, and I set it down carefully, because my hand was not steady.
"I've been seeing Kinsley since August," Whit said.
At the far end of the table a girl in a green dress studied her plate.
Whit's mother kept one hand on his sleeve and her chin up.
Lauren Boykin had been a Bellinger before she married, one of the Bellingers who own half of River Street.
She had planned this dinner down to the napkin rings.
"Belle will be looked after," Whit said.
Lauren slid a folded car voucher across the tablecloth to me.
Under it was a check.
I did not look at the amount.
For fourteen months I had been the cheerful one.
I had laughed at the Boykins' jokes about shrimp boats, and I had learned which fork went with which course.
I had worn the dress Lauren picked for the engagement photos, a size too small, and I had smiled through the whole shoot.
Whit had never met his father, a deckhand who left before he was born.
The one time I asked about him, Lauren changed the subject.
"You asked me on your birthday," I said to Whit.
"The third of March, at this table, in front of all of them."
"I'd just turned twenty-four," he said, and he did not look at me. "I got carried away."
He had a brown cowlick at the crown of his head that I used to flatten with my palm.
I took the ring off.
It was a small Georgia-cut diamond in white gold with W+B engraved inside, and it had always been a little loose.
Lauren's wine glass sat full at her right hand.
I dropped the ring into it.
It sank to the bottom and stayed there.
"He's all yours," I told Lauren. "You always did the talking for him."
Somebody at the back made a noise that might have been a laugh.
I picked my shoes up from under my chair and walked out through the arch into the front room.
I went past the hostess stand with my head up and the whole restaurant behind me.
I got as far as the bar.
My knees stopped working, so I put both hands flat on the wood and stood there with my shoes dangling from my fingers.
Rain was coming down hard on Bull Street.
I had no car, because Whit had driven us, and the voucher was on the table with the check.
The bartender set a glass of water in front of me without a word.
Two stools down sat a big man in a wet dark suit coat, alone, with a whiskey he hadn't touched.
He had a gray-streaked head of hair and a gap in his left eyebrow.
He was looking at me with no pity in his face at all.
He had watched the whole thing through the arch.
I knew it, and he knew I knew it.
He stood up, took off the suit coat and put it around my shoulders.
It was warm, and it smelled of rain and cedar and soap.
"I'm fine," I said.
"You've got mascara on your face," he said, in a low voice with a Savannah edge to it.
He lifted my chin with one big hand and wiped my cheek with his thumb.
His hand was rough.
It stayed on my jaw a moment longer than it needed to, and I leaned into it, and I didn't care who saw.
"I want to be somewhere nobody knows my name," I said.
He looked at me for a long time.
Then he took a hotel key card out of his shirt pocket and laid it on the bar between us.
"Fourteen twelve," he said. "I'm going to finish this drink and not look at you."
Behind me a chair scraped in the back room, and I heard Whit say my name.
I picked up the key card myself.
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