Chapter 2: One Tasting
He was home before I was. That’s how I knew he was scared.
Biscuit met me at the door wagging, and Jake stood behind him in the kitchen with his hands already up, palms out, like I was a cop.
“Em. Before you say anything. It’s not what it looks like.”
“What does it look like?”
“Kayla’s planning her own wedding,” he said quickly. “Her fiancé’s deployed. She didn’t know anybody in Charlotte who’d done this, and I’d already done all the venue research for us, so I said I’d go with her and help. That’s it. I didn’t tell you because I knew you’d make it a thing.”
“You wrote her name in our tasting log.”
“The lady asked who was with me!”
“Next to your name. On our line.” I set my purse on the counter very carefully. “Is Kayla engaged, Jake?”
He hesitated.
I’d looked her up in the parking lot of Magnolia Hall. It had taken eleven seconds. Kayla Reyes had a public Instagram. No ring. No fiancé. No deployed soldier. Her most recent post was from Thursday night: a slice of lemon cake on a white plate, a man’s hand at the edge of the frame wearing a silver watch I’d picked out at the Nordstrom at SouthPark. The caption said: Practice run 🍋💍 Someday.
I held up my phone. He looked at it and the color went out of him like someone pulled a plug.
“It was one tasting,” he said. “Em, it was one tasting. It meant nothing.”
“You fed her our wedding cake.”
“It was a bite.“
“At our venue. At our table. Four weeks before our wedding.” My voice cracked on the last word and I hated it. “How long?”
He sat down at the kitchen table. Biscuit put his chin on Jake’s knee, and Jake scratched his ears without looking at him. Nine years of watching that man’s hands, and I could read them better than his face. They were stalling.
“It’s not… it’s not a thing. It’s been a few months. It’s mostly been talking. I was freaking out about the wedding, okay? About forever. And she was easy to talk to. It got out of hand. I was going to end it before the fourteenth. I swear to God I was going to end it.”
“Before the fourteenth,” I repeated. “So you’d have a clean slate for the vows.”
“That’s not fair.”
I laughed. I didn’t mean to. It came out of me like a cough.
That night I slept at my friend Priya’s. Jake texted thirty-one times. I love you. I made a mistake. Please don’t throw away nine years over a cake.
My mother called at seven the next morning. Jake had called her first. Of course he had.
“Honey,” she said. “Jake told me everything. He’s devastated. Now I’m not saying what he did was right, but every couple has bumps, and the invitations went out in August, and your grandmother…”
“Mom. He’s been seeing someone for months.“
“He said it was mostly talking.”
I hung up on my mother for the first time in my life.
At eleven, an unknown number called. I almost didn’t answer. It was Patricia Morrow. Jake’s mother. The woman who’d taken me shopping for my dress, who’d cried in the fitting room at Kleinfeld and said, I always wanted a daughter.
“Emily, sweetheart,” she said. “I’m so sorry you found out like this.”
Found out like this. I sat up straighter on Priya’s couch.
“Like what?”
Patricia sighed, the patient sigh of a woman explaining something obvious.
“Well, I’ve known about Kayla since June. Jake came to me in tears. We talked it through, and we agreed it was kinder if you didn’t have to know before the wedding. He promised me it would be over by then. I just want you to know he really did try.”
