The call was supposed to last five seconds.Owen FaceTimed me from his parents’ house to ask about the table runners. The wedding was the next afternoon, and my living room looked like a bridal store had come apart at the seams: half-open boxes of candles, place cards stacked in neat columns, a guestbook balanced on the sofa arm, and tiny favor bags that Liam and Sophie had helped me tie with blush ribbon until their fingers gave out. It was the good kind of chaos, the kind that meant something was actually happening, that this time the life I was building would not fall apart before it got started.“Blush or ivory?” Owen asked, his camera wobbling as he moved down a hallway.“Blush,” I said. “It’ll match the flowers.”

“Perfect. Hold on, my mom’s calling me.”The screen went dark. I assumed he would click back in a few seconds. I propped the phone against a vase and kept working, straightening a pile of napkins that did not need straightening, and that was when I heard the voices. Not distant noise, not a television murmuring in another room. Clear voices. Close. The call was still connected.Owen’s mother, Patricia, said, “Did you get her to sign it?”Owen laughed in a way I had never heard from him before. Not the easy laugh he used when he was trying to put me at ease, but something lower, more private, the sound a person makes when they have stepped out of one room and into another where they believe no one is watching. “Almost,” he said. “She gets weird about paperwork, but after the wedding she’ll sign anything I ask. She wants this so bad.”