Page 17 of The Marriage Blunder

Carolyn glared at him with a hatred so precise I felt it pass through me on the way. “You’re nothing, Jude,” she snarled. “You’ve always been nothing.”

He shrugged, the barest flicker. “Takes one to know one.”

Carolyn shrieked and threw a pillow at his head. It missed, hitting the door frame with a soft, final sound.

The bridesmaid woke then, saw the three of us, and made a noise that was not quite language, her face draining of color.

“Get out,” Carolyn shouted. “Get out now.”

I looked at Jude. He looked at me. We left.

In the hallway, Jude exhaled, slow and steady. “She means it.”

“I know.”

“She’s going to make things difficult.” He spoke with the tone of experience.

I simply smirked. “So are we.”

He laughed. The sound was smaller than last night, but real. “You want coffee?”

I groaned. “God, yes.”

We walked back to our suite, hand in hand. The war was not over, but the first shot had been fired, and I was already drafting my response.

* * * *

We checked out of the hotel with minimal ceremony. I paid the bill; Jude handled the incidentals and the necessary apologies to the front desk about the noise. I heard him say “bachelorette party adjacent,” and the woman behind the counter laughed so hard she knocked over her pen cup.

We made it to the airport with nothing to do but wait. Every commercial flight out of Las Vegas was sold out for the next twenty-four hours. I admired the efficiency of it: wedding parties, conventioneers, tech bros, and girls gone wild, all funneling themselves through airport security in a festival of regret and low-grade hangovers.

Jude tried every major carrier first then the discount airlines. Then a series of phone calls that, from the content and tone, told me he was not unfamiliar with situations like this.

Finally, he called a number I didn’t recognize and spoke, in a voice I’d never heard before, to someone named Syros. The conversation was brief and to the point. Jude said he had a “situation” and needed to get out of Las Vegas by the end of the day. Syros told him to “meet at the executive terminal, no questions asked.”

Jude smiled when he hung up, a real smile, the kind that precedes relief. “We have a plane.”

“A plane?”

Just like that?

He nodded. “Technically, it’s my boss’s plane, but I’m the one who tracks all his company credit cards, so it evens out.”

I liked him even more for that.

We made our way to the main terminal and sat in a row of empty seats near the executive terminal at Gate C12. The lights above us buzzed with the kind of relentless intensity you can only get from government contracts and the lowest bidder.

It was early. The terminal was populated only by a few families with small children and one man in a hoodie who had somehow fallen asleep standing up, propped against a vending machine.

“We have time to kill,” I said, stating the obvious.

“I’m not good at killing time.”

“What are you good at?” I asked.

He considered. “Dissecting things, filing them, and turning them into a series of manageable units.”

“You do that with everything?”