Truly (New York 1)

Sure! You’re the bride. I’ll send one of the boys to pick them up.

She wanted to do her own hair, because when she’d suggested at the wedding-hair practice session that she was thinking of wearing it in a beehive for the ceremony, the stylist had looked at her with actual pity.

Allie didn’t want to be pitied. She wanted a beehive.

Of course, darling! her mother had said. You’re the bride. I’ll cancel the appointment.

Allie was starting to feel invulnerable. Maybe even invulnerable enough to say something to May.

Hey, May? Is Ben planning to stick around for the wedding? Because that will get a little awkward, what with Dan flying in a few hours from now, plus the pack of lies we told Mom and all. I think you’d better send the boy toy on his way before your ex arrives in his monkey suit, is all I’m saying.

But May knew the score. She just didn’t care. Or she did care, but not enough to do anything about it.

And meanwhile Mom wouldn’t shut up about Dan. When Dan was coming. How May really needed to talk to him—Have a nice long talk, okay? Okay, May?

May kept saying I’ll talk to him, but don’t get your hopes up. Only Mom wasn’t really listening. And when Mom pleaded with Allie to step in and say something to her sister?

She couldn’t. She simply couldn’t, even though the definitive end of Dan-and-May rang in Allie’s head like the death knell of Allie-and-Matt.

She wasn’t mad at May. Not really. She had been, briefly, when she’d realized it was too late for her to sequester her sister somewhere for the heart-to-heart conversation that would somehow effect the rescue Allie needed, liberating her from her own feelings.

May couldn’t save her from this, and Allie didn’t want to burden her sister with it anyway.

It was only that she was so angry, and she needed someone to pin it on, because pinning it on herself wasn’t getting her anywhere. She wanted to feel different. She wanted not to feel this raw pain in the center of her back, as though someone had stabbed her and now they wouldn’t quit screwing with the hilt of the knife.

She wanted not to know that she was making a terrible mistake, but she did know. She did.

She’d made the mistake the first time she let him kiss her. He’d been wanting to for years—she knew that. Everyone knew that. But when she handed him the kiss, she’d also been handing him her capitulation, and that was what it had taken her some time to see: that from there forward, they were always already heading toward this moment.

It hadn’t been a surprise when he’d dropped to his knee and offered her a tiny, beautifully wrapped box last Christmas. It had been inevitable, the choice already made.

She could keep her house and her dogs and the comfortable domestic thing she and Matt had going—the Sunday morning newspaper, the doughnuts he always drove to pick up, their shared semi-ironic obsession with the weekly Jumble puzzle, the reliable twice-weekly sex and Matt’s eager, friendly face between her legs—or she could ruin it all forever by saying no.

She could break Matt’s heart.

Allie hadn’t hesitated.

She wouldn’t spoil this for him. She couldn’t. With the possible exception of her sister, he was the single loveliest person she’d ever met—beautiful and good all the way through—and he deserved to have everything he wanted.

He wanted her, so she’d handed herself over.

She just wished she weren’t so fucking angry.

May laughed again, and the sound drew Allie’s gaze across the room. Ben was giving her that look, and she was giving it back. Like they were the only people in the room. Like all the air in the world was exclusively for them, and everyone else could suck it.

That kind of passion didn’t last. Everybody said so. Five years down the line, ten years, and everybody started changing their clothes for bed with their backs turned.

But you were supposed to feel like that when you walked down the aisle.

And Matt looked at her that way. Just that way.

Allie searched for something else to staple.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

“Where are we going with these?” Ben asked.

“Over by the train.”