Melissa Senate Read Online Free

wedding in a nice chapel and book you a beautiful dinner reservation. And I can give you a bachelorette party the night before. And then Tom can fly down, and I’ll be your witness. It’ll be like our last hurrah.”

    I burst into tears. Stella might have been easy to not speak to, but like Tom, she was easy to love.

    “Is that a yes?” she asked, handing me a tissue.

     

    It wasn’t a yes. I couldn’t last thirty minutes in a car with Stella, and Las Vegas was a forty-two-hour drive. I knew this because she spent the next hour on Google Maps, printing out the driving directions (Stella had become deathly afraid of flying in the past few years). Every minute or so, she’d come find me chatting to a colleague or one of Tom’s many relatives and whisper something in my ear like, “The outlaw trail where Jesse James and his gang hid would be on our route—well, it’s a slight detour. I wonder if the Grand Canyon is,” and then with lit-up eyes she’d disappear back to the laptop in my bedroom.

    I headed there now to get away from the nonstop talk about “the wedding.” About how many kids we wanted. I’d gotten so many horrified looks when I said I wanted just one child that I started saying four, just to get the smile so I could move on instead of having to defend myself.
     
    Why did you have to defend your own feelings?

    I shut the door behind me and took three quick deep breaths. Stella lay on her stomach on my bed, her legs crossed in the air behind her, the Google maps spread out in front of her. She pointed her pink highlighter at me. “That’s going to be your life. For the next sixty years or so.” She gestured at the pillows by her feet, at some envelopes lying on top. “That hot friend of yours left that for you,” she added. “He said he had to go. Oh, and the Grand Canyon wouldn’t be on the route. But we could take a detour if you wanted.”

    During one of Stella’s holiday visits, “that hot friend of mine” had asked me if she was off-limits, and I said she was, and he’d respected that. If Nick and Stella had ever hooked up (to borrow a phrase from my students), I would have spontaneously combusted.

    I glanced at the envelopes. One fancy, one plain, both in Nick’s terrible handwriting. The fancy one was addressed to me and Tom. I opened it; it was an engagement present, a very generous gift certificate for a weekend at a famous seaside inn not far from here. The second envelope, the one addressed only to me, sort of rescinded the present. It was a note on plain paper:

    Maybe we should be going there. —Nick

    Deep breath. I folded the note to a tiny square and put it in my wallet.
     
    Before I could think or process, Tom’s sister found me with a “there you are!” and launched into color schemes again and how she could plan the entire wedding for us for free. Stella got up from the desk chair and whispered, “We can see the house that James Dean grew up in in Indiana!” I tried to ignore Stella, but she said, “Can I steal my sister for a minute,” to Tom’s sister, then pulled me into the bathroom and shut the door. “Should I call Hertz?” she asked.

    Yes. Yes. Yes. Get me out of here!
     
    No, no, no. It was crazy. And I wasn’t crazy. “Stella, Las Vegas is almost three thousand miles from here. You and me in a car for three thousand miles? Come on.” Then again, perhaps I should find a wedding chapel—a drive-through, at that—as soon as possible so that I didn’t destroy a good thing. And Tom and I had a good thing. A very good thing. Tom had been there when my mother died. He’d taken care of me. He’d taken care of business. He’d been there for two more years of my life. And we’d both had ups and downs.

    Nick, on the other hand, had been my lunch buddy. Had shared his stories about women. About his lack of feelings about the women he dated.
     
    But he’d also been there when my mother died. While I’d been waiting for Stella’s plane to