Chapter 1: Flour in Her Hair
My sister’s lipstick was on my fiancé’s collar, and he was still buttoning his shirt when I opened the door.
“Claire.” Tyler didn’t even sound surprised. He sounded annoyed, like I’d walked in on a phone call. “Knock, maybe?”
Behind him, Brooke sat on the edge of the coat-check counter in the red dress I’d helped her zip an hour ago. My maid of honor. My little sister. She smoothed her platinum hair with both hands and looked at the floor.
Through the wall I could hear the rehearsal dinner going on without us. Forty guests at the Ashley River Yacht Club. Glasses clinking. Somebody’s cousin telling the story about the time Tyler sank his father’s sailboat. In two days I was supposed to marry him under the live oaks at his mother’s house, next to a cake I had baked myself. Four tiers. Lemon and lavender. It was sitting in the walk-in cooler at my bakery right now, with a sheet of parchment over the top so nothing would fall on it.
“How long?” I asked.
Brooke said, “Claire, it’s not—”
“How long?”
“Since March,” Tyler said, and shrugged into his navy blazer. “Look. It doesn’t have to change anything. The wedding’s paid for. My mother has two hundred people coming. We get married Saturday, Brooke and I end it, everybody moves on. Grown-up stuff.”
I looked at my sister. She still wouldn’t look at me.
“I’m calling it off,” I said.
Tyler laughed. Not a mean laugh. A patient one, the laugh you give a kid who says she’s running away from home.
“Babe. Come on. You’re thirty-four. You work fourteen hours a day in a kitchen. Who else would marry a baker with flour in her hair?”
The coat-check room went very quiet. Somewhere behind the wall an ice machine hummed.
I took off the ring. It was his grandmother’s, a square diamond in an old platinum setting, and it had always been a little loose on me. I set it on the counter next to Brooke’s hand.
“Keep it in the family,” I said, and walked out.
I didn’t go back through the dining room. I went out the side door, down the wooden stairs, onto the dock, where the string lights swung in the wind off the river and the boats knocked softly against their bumpers. My heels kept catching between the boards. I took them off and stood there barefoot in my pink silk dress, holding them, shaking so hard my teeth clicked.
I didn’t cry. That surprised me. I just kept thinking about the cake.
“You dropped this.”
I turned around. A man stood at the top of the dock in a navy sweater, holding one of my pearl earrings between two fingers. I hadn’t even felt it fall. He was older than Tyler, late forties maybe, tall, with silver in his beard and gray eyes that didn’t slide away from my face the way people’s eyes usually do when a woman is falling apart.
“Thank you,” I said.
He came down and set the earring in my palm. He didn’t ask if I was okay. He looked at my bare feet, at the shoes in my hand, at the river, and said, “There’s a diner on Bay Street that stays open till midnight. Terrible coffee. Very good pie. I’m not asking you to go. I’m just telling you it exists.”
“I make better pie than anyone on Bay Street,” I said. My voice cracked in the middle.
Something moved at the corner of his mouth. “Then I’ll have to come find out.”
I didn’t ask his name. I walked to my car barefoot, and he didn’t follow.
My phone buzzed before I’d even started the engine. Tyler.
You’ll be back by Christmas. Nobody else is going to want you, Claire. Be smart.
I sat in the dark parking lot with my shoes in my lap and read it three times.
Then a second message came in. Not from Tyler. From my mother.
Brooke says you made a scene. Call me RIGHT NOW. Diane Hayes is furious.
Up on the deck, behind the glass, the party was still going as if nothing had happened. And standing alone at the railing, looking down at my car with his hands in his pockets, was the man in the navy sweater.
He wasn’t looking at the party.
He was looking at me.
