He hung up, and I saw that during this conversation, my sister had silently been getting more and more stressed—I could see the vein in her temple, the one that I used to tease her about endlessly, starting to show. “What’s wrong?”
“There’s a small problem at the Inn,” he said, referring to where the rehearsal dinner was taking place tonight. “Something about the decorations. I’d go myself, but I need to supervise the tent guys—”
“I knew this would happen,” Linnie said, her voice getting shakier and higher with every word. “Our wedding planner disappears, and then everything starts—”
“I’ll go!” I jumped in. “I can get it sorted out.”
Will nodded. “Sounds good. Bill, you go as well, okay? And report back.”
“Sure,” Bill said, nodding. Then he looked at me. “If it’s okay with you.”
“Of course,” I said. I gave Linnie what I hoped was a confident I’ve got this look. “I’m sure it’s not anything big. But whatever it is, we’ll handle it.”
“Thanks, Charlie.”
I grabbed my keys off the hook by the door and raised my eyebrows at Bill. “Let’s go.”
* * *
It was a twenty-minute drive from our house to the Inn, and for the first fifteen, either Bill or I had been on the phone. Bill was fielding texts and calls pretty much nonstop—apparently, they’d had to move some things around to take on Linnie’s wedding at the last minute, so he was having to reschedule appointments. And Siobhan had called me, wanting to know what the text I’d sent her—Your fruit name theory was right—meant. We’d had a quick talk, but since I was driving, the call was over the car speakers, and I was all too aware that it wasn’t just me listening. It wasn’t until we were nearly there that Bill set down his phone, looked across the car, and smiled at me.
I smiled back, and in the quiet that fell between us for the first time this whole ride, I suddenly realized that I was in a small enclosed space with a guy I didn’t know—like, at all.
“So,” I said, figuring that I could just treat Bill like he was the subject of a profile I was writing and get the basics of his background. The Wedding Planner’s Nephew, it could be called, even if it kind of sounded like a bad romantic comedy. I was just going to cross off the “who” of the all-important five Ws—who, what, where, when, why—that all journalists used. These words were painted three feet high in a mural in the Stanwich High newsroom. “Do you like working in event planning?”
Bill looked over at me with a smile, and I was starting to realize that this was his default expression—it was like he had resting cheerful face. “I do,” he said. “It’s always something different, at any rate. I worked for Where There’s A Will all through high school, and I didn’t have any exciting spring break plans, so when my uncle offered to fly me out if I would help him this week, I said sure.”
I nodded. This had always been my favorite part of the work at the newspaper—talking to people, putting their story together, knowing when to jump in and when to hang back and nod and hope they’d tell you more. Maybe it came from being the youngest and having to listen and observe, but for whatever reason, it had always come easily to me. “Where are you on spring break from?”
“University of Chicago. In . . . Chicago,” he added, then laughed. “I guess that’s pretty self-explanatory. I’m finishing up my first year.”
I took a breath, about to mention my Northwestern acceptance, but stopped myself before I spoke. I wasn’t going to Northwestern, and there didn’t seem to be much point in talking about where you weren’t going to college. “Did you go to Stanwich?” I asked instead, even though I was pretty sure the answer was no. Stanwich High was a huge school, but most of the people there were at least vaguely familiar. And Siobhan and I had made it our mission to know who the cute guys were. And while Bill was no Jesse Foster, he was someone we definitely would have noticed.
He shook his head. “I’m from Putnam,” he said, naming the town one over from Stanwich. “And . . . sometimes Albuquerque.”
I glanced over at him, surprised, but before I could ask a follow-up, I saw the sign for the Inn and signaled to turn down the long and winding driveway that led to the main building.
“I think I’ve been here before,” Bill said, squinting as he leaned forward. “I can’t remember what for, though. Maybe someone’s sweet sixteen?”
I nodded. “Sounds about right.” The Inn was where I had attended lots of various functions over the years—weddings, receptions, birthday parties, the bar and bat mitzvahs that seemed to take up every weekend of my seventh-grade social calendar, and even junior prom last year when a pipe burst at the school and we couldn’t hold it on campus. It was an old mansion with a carriage house that had been converted to a hotel, with guest rooms upstairs and a restaurant and ballroom downstairs. I pulled into one of the empty parking spots out front and killed the engine, getting out of the car at the same time as Bill.
“Charlie?”
I turned around and saw that there was a guy standing in front of me. He was wearing a baseball cap and a long-sleeved T-shirt with STANWICH LANDSCAPING printed across the front of it, and jeans with dirt stains on the knees. He looked like he was the age of my older siblings, with blond hair and green eyes, and it took me a moment to place him—this was Olly Gillespie, Linnie’s high school boyfriend.
“Hey, Olly,” I said, lifting a hand in a wave.
Olly and Linnie had been pretty serious in high school—they’d dated through junior and senior year, and then the summer before college. She’d broken up with him before she went to Dartmouth. Apparently, after Linnie and Rodney had gotten together, he hadn’t taken the news that Linnie had moved on very well. I wasn’t clear on what had happened in real life, but Olly’s strip doppelgänger drove to Dartmouth in the middle of the night to stand under her dorm window with an iPod and a portable speaker to try to win Linnie back. It obviously didn’t work, and I didn’t see much of Olly until Linnie moved back after her split with Rodney.
A few weeks after she’d moved home, Olly Gillespie started showing up again—he was in the driveway, picking Linnie up, standing around the kitchen with us, in the backyard talking mulch with my dad. From what I’d been able to gather, he’d never really left Stanwich, and after college he’d started working for his dad’s landscaping company. Although it was clear to all the rest of us that Linnie and Rodney were going to get back together eventually, it seemed like Olly had never gotten over Linnie. I was never sure what, exactly, had happened with them when she and Rodney were broken up—but as soon as she got back together with Rodney, Olly disappeared again.
“I thought it was you,” he said. “What are you doing here?” He crossed to the Stanwich Landscaping truck that was parked two cars down from mine and hoisted out a leaf blower. I turned to gesture to Bill, to introduce him, only to see that Bill was on his phone again and had walked halfway to the steps.
“Just wedding stuff. Linnie’s getting married this weekend, so . . .” I immediately wondered if that had been tactless.