A promotion.
I tried longer.
I could not make it mean still a waitress.
I could not make it mean ask Gus.
I’d spent three years explaining her to myself.
And she had not in three years asked me one question about my life.
Not one.
The rule I’d made at 27 hadn’t kept the peace.
It had kept me invisible.
And it had done it so well that my own sister could describe me to strangers without ever having looked.
I didn’t delete anything.
I didn’t send anything.
I took a screenshot of the two messages, mine and hers, and I saved it.
Not to show anybody.
To show myself the next time I started explaining.
In the morning, I drove out to James Island to the only person who’d been in the room when I signed.
Gus was on his knees in the tomato beds with a bucket and a pair of scissors.
Seventy-four years old in a hat that had been white once.
He didn’t get up.
He handed me the bucket.
I told him about the engagement dinner.
The buyout.
The employee rate.
Mr. Pereira, the owner, who was so fond of the bride’s sister.
He laughed once.
Dry.
“Tell them I’m dead. It’ll simplify things.”
“I’m going to go to the dinner,” I said. “I’m going to pay for it quietly as a gift. I’m not going to say anything. It’s her night.”
He cut a tomato off the vine, looked at it, and put it in the bucket.
“You keep buying a seat at a table that seats you by the kitchen door.”
“Gus—”
“You apologize for a lot of people, Marin. I said that to you when you were 24, and you thought I was being nice. How long are you going to apologize for that girl?”
“I’m scared of losing her.”
He sat back on his heels and looked at me from under the hat.
“When did you have her?”
I didn’t have an answer for that.
I stood in his garden holding his bucket and couldn’t think of a single time.
He didn’t tell me what to do.
That was the thing about Gus.
He’d hand you the tool and let you figure out the door.
He filled a paper sack with tomatoes and put it in my arms.
“Change the name on the menu.”
Then he went back to his beds.
Driving home, I decided three things.
I’d go to the dinner.
I’d still pay for it.
I couldn’t shake that loose yet, and I knew it.
But after the dinner, face to face, I’d tell Brooke the truth.
All of it.
In more than one line.
And when the Whitlocks called back about June, I’d answer them myself.
As what I was.
Not through Brooke.
Not as Gus.
It wasn’t enough.
But it was the first time I’d ever put a deadline on my own silence.
My phone buzzed on the passenger seat.
Brooke.
Can you come to my apartment? Need to ask you something about the wedding.
Praying-hands emoji.
Brooke’s apartment was in Mount Pleasant in one of the new buildings with a gym nobody used and a lobby that smelled like a candle.
Her dining table had disappeared under wedding.
Fabric swatches.
A color-coded binder.
Three printouts of the same floral arrangement in slightly different whites.
And her laptop opened to a seating chart with no names in it yet.
“Okay,” she said before I’d sat down. “So Celeste wants Larks for the wedding.”
“I know.”
“She’s already told people, Marin. She told the Pruitts and the Langs at the club. She’s telling everyone it’s Larks. So I need you to talk to Gus.”
“Talk to Gus.”
“Tell him it’s family. You know how he likes you. And if he could do it at cost or close to it. Grant’s parents are paying, but Celeste hates being overcharged. It’s, like, her whole thing.”
“And if she thinks she’s getting a deal, she’ll be so happy. And then she’ll be happy with me.”
She smiled.
“You can make that happen, right?”
I looked at her.
At my sister.
Thirty-one years old, with our father’s eyebrows and our mother’s way of asking a question so it sounded like a plan.
“Brooke,” I said. “What do you think I do at Larks?”
She didn’t look up from the swatches.
“I know what you do. You manage it.”
“You’ve got a piece of it, whatever. But Gus is the one who decides, right?”
That right was the whole thing.
It wasn’t a question.
It was a door she was holding open so I could walk through it and nod the way I’d nodded at 16th birthdays and graduation dinners and every table she’d ever asked for.
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