I cancel my eight o'clock with the linen supplier at 7:40 and lose the rush slot I begged for, because I want Rhys before he has a chance to be busy. By eight I'm at Whitford Marine, Pier 9, in the wrong shoes. Why does it take a man three years of silence and one phone call to get me back inside his father's yard?
The steel is cold enough to ache through my coat sleeve. Diesel, and gulls screaming over the dry dock, and Rhys at the foot of a scaffold with a clipboard he is not reading.
"Mae. You didn't call."
"You called Dec at ten past six on the morning of our wedding." I let that sit. "You asked him if you should marry me."
His face does the thing it does. It opens, and warms, and goes slightly out of focus. "Come on. He told you that?"
"I locked him in a church."
"Of course you did." He almost laughs. "Mae, it was a bad night. You know me."
"I do. That's the problem." I put my red binder on an oil drum. "I want Dec off the wedding. Replace him. Anyone. Your cousin."
"I can't."
"Can't, or won't?"
"Dec's the only one who understands the agreement." He says it to the scaffold. "You don't know what's in it. I can't just swap him for Danny from the yard."
"Then tell me what's in it."
"It's not that simple."
"Rhys."
A crane swings overhead and the shadow crosses us both. He wipes his hands on his pants, one palm and then the other, and the words come out of him before he has finished deciding on them.
"Whoever walks away alone pays. If I walk, Conrad takes the yard."
The gulls scream again. I wait for the rest, and I am very good at waiting for the rest.
"That's all I'm saying," Rhys says.
"Pays what? Rhys, who's *Conrad* to the yard?"
"That's all I'm saying." He rubs his neck. "Look. Dec said you'd be better off. That morning. It wasn't my idea, I just asked him, and he said you'd be better off. I believed him. He's usually right."
He has been sorry for three years without once saying the word. I can hear it going by like a bus that doesn't stop.
I pick up my binder.
Wexley Hartigan is fourteen floors of glass, and the receptionist on the fourteenth knows my face from forty thousand phones and doesn't have time to decide whether to stop me. Dec's door is open. He is standing at the window with a file, and he puts it down when he sees my face, very precisely, squared to the edge of the desk.
"Maeve."
"Declan Drury." I shut the door. "You told him I'd be better off."
"Yes."
"Just yes."
"You asked me for a true answer yesterday. I'm not going to hand you a different one today."
"Then give me the whole one. Start at ten past six."
He doesn't sit. "Rhys asked me, *Do you think I love her?* I said, *If you have to ask me, don't.*"
"And that was the verdict."
"That was my opinion."
"You decided I was better off humiliated." My voice is so level I could hang a picture from it. "A hundred and forty people, Dec. A cellist."
"I decided he shouldn't marry someone he had to ask about." His jaw works once. "I'd say it again."
"Of course you would. You have never had to stand anywhere."
"That's not true."
"Name one."
He picks up the file, puts it down again.
"September 2022," he says, quieter. "The engagement dinner. The pipe under the pass went in the middle of the main course, and forty people started edging toward the door. You were wearing the green dress and the gold heels with the ankle strap. You kicked the cupboard open, you found the stopcock behind the bleach, and you turned it with a butter knife and the heel of your shoe. Then you went back out and said the sorbet was early."
My mouth has gone dry.
"The left strap had come undone," he says. "You never fixed it. You stood on the terrace all through the toasts with it trailing."
I have not thought about my own strap in years. Dec has been carrying it around, whole, and he knows the exact color.
Neither of us says anything. He looks at the file. I look at the thin gray carpet where my shoes are leaving two wet marks.
"That has nothing to do with this," I say.
"No."
"Good."
"Good."
I take a breath that has nothing in it. "You said Rhys called you at ten past six that morning. Has he rung since?"
Dec looks at the window. "This morning. Six-forty."
"And?"
"Same question." A pause, exact and unwilling. "About Sloane."
The floor does something I'd like to blame on the fourteenth storey. If Rhys asks, and Dec says what he said to me, Rhys bolts. The wedding dies on a Wednesday in April with thirty-one days left on my clock. Clause 14 says the ninety thousand is mine to repay, and the thirty thousand at the end is only a number on a page that I will never see.
And every guest will say the same thing, and they'll be right. *She did this to him twice.*
"You didn't answer him," I say.
"I told him I'd call back."
I almost laugh. It comes out of me ugly. "Do you understand what I am about to say? I need my ex to get married. I need it more than Sloane does."
"I understand it perfectly." His voice is dry as paper. "I am the only person in the building who does."
His phone rings on the desk. It lies face up between the file and my binder, buzzing in a slow circle on the walnut, and the name on the screen is OWEN STRAND.
Dec reaches for it.
I get there first. My thumb finds the green button before he has finished moving, and I put the phone to my ear and say it clearly, the way you read a hard out to a band.
"It's Maeve. Dec says you'd be an idiot not to marry her."
I hang up.
Dec stands very still, one hand still stretched out over the desk.
"Maeve," he says quietly. "He's never once in his life done the opposite of what I told him."