Page 9 of Beached Wedding

It rang like a piledriver in my ears. I swallowed, thinking I might have rushed the gun on eating. I made myself say the rest and hoped only words came out of my mouth.

“I asked him if he loved you. Like, the way his parents love each other. Get through anything love. He said his mum and dad had been after him to propose to you. You were going home and they thought you were good for him, that it was time he grew up. He thought so, too.”

“He doesn’t love me?” The break in her voice cracked something in my ears.

I took a breath, but it didn’t seem to have any air in it, only thick, hot humidity. My lungs burned.

“Shane said that signing the prenup was like admitting he expected to divorce you. I asked him if he did expect that and he said he couldn’t see being with you forever.”

Her gasp went into my chest like a blade, but I didn’t falter. I finished her off.

“I said if he was going into your marriage thinking it wouldn’t last, then he shouldn’t marry you at all.”

“Yousaid that.” Her eyes were bleak.

“I did.” And as sorry as I was for hurting her, I didn’tsayI was sorry. I still believed I had done right by both of them.

I’d had a front row seat on their relationship. They were a pair of puppies who frolicked and nipped and growled, always in play mode with each other. When things got real or difficult, they retreated from each other. Shane appealed to Ashley because she had had to grow up too young and Shane was very much a Peter Pan free-spirit. He was fun. That’s why everyone loved him. Shane liked Ash because she enabled him to stay exactly as he was. She washed the dishes and picked up his socks, fetched groceries and reminded him to visit the dentist.

Her mouth began to tremble.

I held out a hand, an offer to hug. It was a plea not to be hated. “We got to the airport and he said he couldn’t get on the plane.”

“He wasdrunk.”

“He was.” We’d both been swaying and slurring our words, but a moment of acute sobriety had cut through the fog. Shane had hugged me and said ‘Thanks, mate.’

“You could have made him come and tell me himself.” Her voice rang with a deep well of hurt. Injury done to her by Shane and by me.

“He didn’t want to face his parents.” Or her. Evasion of difficult conversations was an art for Shane. That’s why I’d had to pick my moment to press him on the prenup. Shane had side-stepped several times and had only faced it when we ran out of time.

Maybe I was as guilty as everyone else of enabling Shane to skirt responsibility, though. I knew his avoidance of something didn’t mean he wasn’t brooding privately. Looking back, I could see the way he’d tensed up every time I mentioned asking Ashley to sign. I would bet my share in T&B that Shane had known deep down, from the moment he’d put Ashley on the plane with a ring on her finger, that he hadn’t really wanted to marry her.

Standing outside the airport in Sydney yesterday, we’d both known that if he came to Hawaii, he would buckle to Ashley and his parents and the pressure of the moment. He would marry her and they’d be stuck in a marriage that was doomed.

That wasn’t fair to either of them.

My drunk logic had concluded that, as the best man, I was duty-bound to back him up, but this wassoshitty. It suckedso hardto face her.

“Ashley, you know what I came from,” I said gently. “I wasn’t going to stand there and watch a train wreck happen.”

“You don’t know that’s what would have happened. You didn’t even give me a chance. You didn’t giveusa chance!”

Her sudden outburst lashed at me and maybe she was right, but, “Did you lovehim, Ash? Hell and high water kind of love?”

She jerked back. “Don’t you question my motives. You just screwed my entire life. You could have had this talk with Shane three months ago, before I put my life in a box and sent it to Australia. Do Ilovehim? I quit my job and sold my car to buy plane tickets for my family to be here for my wedding day. What doyouthink?”

“I think you’re angry,” I said in a level voice, trying to keep this from escalating, but I was sharply aware she hadn’t said,Yes. I love Shane. “You want to blame someone and I’m fine being that person.” I gathered our things, including the plastic cup still dripping whipped cream and iced coffee. It was caked with sand. “But would you rather be in a new country, living in his house and sleeping in his bed, maybe carrying his kid when you found out he hadn’t really wanted to marry you?”

She paled. “No. But what am I supposed to do now? Go back to Canada? Tonothing?”

It wasn’t ‘nothing.’ She had family. I knew it was a complicated one. Wasn’t everyone’s? But they loved her.

I didn’t say that, though. I walked to the trash bin and threw away the cup.

My conscience contorted into a knot, squeezing and hurting every inch of me as I turned back and said what had cut through my inebriation in the back of the cab.

“I love Shane like a brother, Ash. But he gave up and walked away before you even got married. What does that tell you about your chances?”

---