Page 4 of The Marriage Blunder

I pushed my glasses up my nose. The room was very quiet. Outside the window, Las Vegas continued being Las Vegas, which is to say it continued being exactly as loud and bright and excessive as it had promised to be, and I continued being exactly as prepared for it as I had promised myself I would be.

I had a plan. I had the museum’s hours saved in my phone. I had approximately forty-five minutes before I had to go downstairs and perform the role of Jude Thomas, Supportive Brother, Perfectly Fine. A role I had been rehearsing for most of my adult life, with varying degrees of success.

I stood up and straightened my shirt. It was a blue button-down. Not the blue that says “notice me,” but the blue that says “I am a responsible adult who owns more than one shirt.”

I had packed specifically for this. I had packed specifically for a lot of things, because I am nothing if not prepared for situations I would rather not be in.

I sat on the edge of the bed and laced up my shoes, one eyelet at a time, with the focused calm of a man walking into something he has already decided he can handle.

I could handle this. I’d handled worse. I’d handled four hours next to a cooking show enthusiast. I’d handled eleven months of Kenneth James’s occasional, devastating attention.

I’d handled being the quiet one, the careful one, the one who kept the peace and took up as little space as possible, for so long that it had become less a habit and more a personality trait.

I tied the second shoe, stood up, and adjusted my glasses. Forty-five minutes then the performance began.

I was ready.

Or I would be, which was close enough.

Chapter Two

~ Kenneth ~

Forty-two was the age at which you stopped pretending to enjoy clubs and just dealt with it when forced to be present. There is no dignity in a velvet rope, no revelation left in the electric glare of a bar where the music alone could raise your blood pressure.

But when your fiancée requests bottle service and “the full experience” for her bachelorette party, you oblige. You pay the premium for a curved booth of white leather, you buy the liquor in quantities that would kill a small horse, and you post up in the VIP like a dignitary whose kingdom is full of other dignitaries with better hairlines and more expensive shoes.

I had a neat view of the club from where I sat. Strobing lights, DJ perched in his glass box like a power-mad hamster, floor thrumming with the efforts of the young and the very young to outlast each other. The table in front of me was crowded with sweating bottles: champagne, vodka, one very optimistic bottle of orange juice.

To my left, an ice bucket slowly leaked condensation onto my sleeve. On my right, an entire wedding party—not ours—had decided to turn their pre-party into a test of which member could eat the most novelty candy underwear off of a hired model. They were up to three pairs each.

I could only admire the stamina.

Carolyn was in white, of course. Not an accident. She wore it with the precision of a woman who has spent her whole life refining herself down to the most effective version of a human being.

The dress was simple, not ostentatious—she abhorred the idea of being mistaken for someone desperate for attention—but it had structure, it had purpose. Her hair fell in what I assumed were expensive curls down one shoulder, a deliberate asymmetry I’d been told was “in.”

Her laughter, audible even at this volume, was the laughter of someone who could convincingly audition for the concept of fun itself.

I watched her work the room. This was not a party so much as an audition, and she aced it, just like she always did.

I had met her at a charity gala a little under a year ago, something for underprivileged children in a city whose real estate had never once failed to profit me. She’d been charming, devastating, and I’d been distracted by a sudden emergency in the Asian markets and missed most of her anecdotes.

We had three dates, and then we had a ring. Somewhere in between, I assumed there had been a reason we’d become engaged, a logic that would make sense to me if I sat down with it and ran the numbers.

I had yet to find the logic.

What I had found, consistently, was that every conversation was a negotiation, every kindness the beginning of a transaction. Carolyn had never asked me a question she didn’t already know the answer to. She had also never asked me one she actually cared about.

I was really starting to wonder how in the hell we’d gotten engaged. Even more, I was starting to wonder if I’d lost my brains somewhere along the way. Why was I staying engaged to a woman who clearly saw me as an accessory, bright and shiny when she needed me, but put on a shelf when she didn’t?

I had to be insane.

I was nursing a glass of Oban, triple rocks, when the air in the room changed. I didn’t see him walk in. I felt it the way you feel the arrival of an unexpected check at a business lunch.

Jude Allen Thomas, in person, was not the fantasy.

He was smaller than I remembered. Softer, around the middle—the word doughy is not kind, but it was not inaccurate—and dressed in a button-down so correct for the occasion that it managed, somehow, to be more out of place than the novelty candy eating contest.