They Toasted the Happy Couple, So I Bought the Groom novel · Chapter 8 of 32

Chapter 8: The Dock

Every Fourth of July since I was born, the Cromwells had a table on the lawn of the yacht club in Annapolis.

Nobody had told me not to come.

Nobody had told me anything since Friday, which was how I knew to come.

I wore navy, and my mother's pearl earrings, and I parked my old Honda between two Porsches.

The club lawn ran down to the water in long green stripes. Flags on every mast. A band in white jackets playing songs from before I was born.

Every head on the terrace turned when I came up the steps.

Then every head turned back, too fast.

Marigold was holding court under the big umbrella with six of her friends.

She had her phone out.

She was showing them something, and the friends were leaning in, hands over their mouths.

I didn't have to see the screen.

One of the friends looked up at me, then at my mouth, as if she expected the lipstick to still be smudged.

"I just think people should know," Marigold was saying. "For his sake."

One of the friends saw me and nudged her.

Marigold looked up, and she smiled.

"Iris! You came. Brave."

"I'm a director," I said. "The commodore always buys the directors a drink."

The commodore, at the bar in his blazer, looked like he wished he were somewhere else.

He bought me the drink.

I drank it on the edge of the terrace and talked to the widow about her roses, and I didn't look at my sister once.

Clive was not there.

My father was. He sat at the family table with Berenice and didn't speak to me, and when the banker came over to say hello to me, my father called him away.

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