“There’s something I need—”
“Honey.” Wyn’s back at my side, his hands catching my waist as if in preparation to throw me over his shoulder and abscond if necessary. “Sabrina and Parth have something to tell you,” he says pointedly. “To tell everyone.”
My skin tingles under his grip. I’m suddenly convinced I’m not wearing any shorts, but nope, I can just magically feel his calloused fingers through the denim.
When I try to extricate myself, his fingertips sink into the curves of my hips. Don’t move, his eyes warn.
Bite me, I try to make mine reply.
The right peak of his lips twitches irritably.
Sabrina is getting a bottle of champagne out of the stainless steel and glass refrigerator, but she doesn’t look celebratory. She looks downright melancholy.
Parth goes to stand behind her, setting his hands on her shoulders. “We have a couple of announcements,” he says. “And Wyn already knows, because, well, we had to give him the full picture so he understood why it was so essential that he’s here this week. That all of us are.”
“Oh my god!” Kimmy half screams, instantly ecstatic. “Are you two having a—”
“Oh god, no!” Sabrina says. “No. No! Definitely not. It’s—it’s the house.” She pauses for a breath, then swallows and lifts her chin. “Dad’s selling it. Next month.”
The kitchen goes pin-drop silent. Not comfortable quiet, shocked quiet.
Cleo wilts onto a stool at the counter. Wyn’s hands scrape clear of me, and he immediately puts several feet of distance between us, no longer considering me at risk of confessing, apparently.
I stand there, an astronaut untethered from her spaceship, drifting into nothingness.
I’ve already lost the person I expected to marry. I’ve already moved across the country from all my best friends. And now this house—our house, this pocket universe where we always belong, where no matter what else is happening, we’re safe and happy—that’s going away too.
All the panic I felt at finding myself trapped here with Wyn is instantly eclipsed by this new dread.
Our house.
Where, the summer after sophomore year, Cleo, Sabrina, and I slept in a row of mattresses we’d dragged to the middle of the living room floor and dubbed “super bed,” staying up most nights talking and laughing until the first rays of sunrise spilled in from the patio doors.
Where Cleo whispered, as if it were a secret or a prayer, I’ve never had friends like this, and Sabrina and I nodded solemnly, the three of us holding hands until we drifted off.
The firepit out back where, in lieu of a blood pact (which struck me as dangerously unsanitary), the three of us had burned the same spot on our pointer fingers against the hot metal, then made ourselves laugh until we cried, concocting increasingly ridiculous scenarios where we could use our fingerprint scars to frame one another for various heists.
The wooden staircase on which Parth once orchestrated an elaborate cardboard luge race for us, and the little wood-paneled library in front of whose hearth Cleo first told us about a girl named Kimmy. The nail that stuck up from the pier where, a year later, Kimmy cut her foot open, and the rickety staircase Wyn had carried her up afterward while she demanded the rest of us chuck grapes at her open mouth, fan her with invisible palm fronds.
And Wyn.
The first time I kissed him.
The first time I touched him, period. Here.
This house is all that’s left of us.
“This will be our last trip.” Sabrina tugs her scarf from her head and tosses the slip of silk across the counter. “Our last trip here, anyway.”
The words hang in the air. I wonder if the others are also scrambling for a solution, like maybe if we pass around a hat and combine our spare change, we’ll find six million dollars to buy a vacation home.
“Can’t you—” Kimmy begins.
“No,” Sabrina cuts her off. “Wife Number Six doesn’t want Dad to have it, since he bought it with my mom, I guess. Never mind that there are four more-recent wives she could fixate her jealousy on.” She rolls her eyes. “Dad’s already got a buyer lined up and everything. It’s a done deal.”
Parth rocks Sabrina’s shoulders, trying to shake her out of the dark mood.
My gaze wanders toward Wyn, a subconscious part of me still expecting the sight of him to drain away my stress.
Instead, the second our eyes meet, my heart starts jackhammering. I look away.
“It’s not all bad news, though,” Parth says. “We actually have some good news too. Amazing news.”
Sabrina looks up from the champagne she’s been de-foiling. “Right. There’s something else.”
“Oh, right, there’s something else,” Parth mimics, teasing. “Don’t treat our engagement like a sidebar.”
“Your what?”
At first I’m not sure who shrieked it.
Me. I shrieked it.
Well, me and Cleo, who shoots up from her stool so fast, she knocks it over and has to catch it against the island with her hip.
Sabrina’s cackle is halfway between giddy and disbelieving.
“Your what?” I repeat.
“Dude, I know,” she says. “I’m as surprised as you are.”
Kimmy snatches Sab’s hand and gasps at the gigantic emerald winking on her ring finger.
Which is approximately when I realize that someone’s going to notice my missing engagement ring.
I stuff my hands in my pockets. Very natural. Just a girl with her fists in her tiny, useless women’s shorts pockets.
“You said you’d never get married,” Cleo says with a scrupulous dent between her brows, eyeing the gemstone and its white-gold mount. “Under any circumstances. You said ‘not with a gun to my head.’?”
And who could blame her? Even setting her father’s trail of ex-wives aside, Sabrina is a divorce attorney. She spends eight hours a day, at minimum, surrounded by reasons not to get married.
“Tell us the story,” Kimmy says as Cleo continues, “You once told me you’d rather spend five years in prison than one year as a wife.”
“Babe!” Kimmy pokes Cleo in the ribs. “We’re celebrating. Sabrina changed her mind. People do that, you know.”
People do; Sabrina Armas doesn’t.
Sometimes I’ll go back and forth about what I want for breakfast for so long that it’s already lunch. Sabrina eats the same exact yogurt and granola every day, the only variation being whatever seasonal fruit she adds.
Sabrina coils an arm around Parth’s waist. “Yeah, well. Finding out we’d be saying goodbye to the cottage cleared some stuff up for me.” Her voice gives the slightest waver before going steely again. “Whether Parth and I are married or not, I’m in this for the long haul, and I’m tired of trying to be smart at the expense of my own happiness. I want this to be forever, and I don’t want to pretend that’s not what I want.”
Kimmy sets a hand across her chest. “That’s beautiful.”