Page 48 of Runaway Bride and Prejudice

A wedding party. Amelia stiffens.

They stop in the center of the lobby and the whole group cheers as the groom dips the bride and kisses her.

And kisses her.

And …kissesher.

I don’t think Amelia is even breathing. I give her a light squeeze, my palm curled at her waist, but she doesn’t move.

“Here you go,” the woman at the counter says.

When I reach for my card, Amelia slips from my arm.

“I just need to use the bathroom,” she blurts out.

My chest compresses as her face crumples and she scampers across the lobby, her fists curled tight by her sides. I slip my card back in my wallet, ask the woman at the desk if she can watch our Walmart bags for a moment, and then I jog toward the bathroom.

I walk right into the women’s bathroom.

Okay—so I should have knocked. A woman washing her hands at the sink jumps at the sight of me, eyes wide.

“Sorry,” I say, though I’m not. “I’m looking for a friend?—”

“Van?” Amelia’s voice, a little tremulous, sounds from one of the stalls.

The woman washing her hands makes a hasty exit as I stride down to the next-to-last stall, which is the only one fully closed. It’s also the only one with someone sniffling behind it.

I rap my knuckles against the white wood door. “Mills? You in there?”

“Maybe. Why areyouin here?”

I lean against the door, crossing my arms. “Open up.”

“What if I’m pooping?”

I snort. “Are you?”

A pause. “No.”

“Then let me in.”

A longer pause. Then I hear the shuffle of movement and the solid clack of the lock sliding open. Amelia cracks the door open, meeting my eyes with red-rimmed ones of her own. My stomach dips.

I have a knee-jerk visceral reaction to tears, stemming straight from childhood and three sisters.

Callie, my older sister, swears she never cries, but I’ve seen it. Once. She made me swear it never happened. It was beyondterrifying to see the sister who seems made of indestructible material break down over a particularly horrendous breakup.

I’ve tried but couldn’t quite forget the way her normally impermeable facade cracked and fell.

Alexandra cries when she’s happy, when she’s sad, when greeting card commercials come on or when a sports team or athlete shines. “I just love seeing people succeed with their gifts,” Lex told me once while wiping her eyes after watching an Olympic gymnast’s floor routine.

And while my youngest sister, Grey—short for Greyson—isn’t quite to Lex’s level, she cries a normal amount and also whenever anyone else is crying. But Grey hardly ever stops smiling—even if she’s also crying.

The sight of tears immediately cloaks me in an overwhelming sense of powerlessness. Combined with an irrational and powerful urge to fix whatever it is. Whether that’s scaring the pants off a stupid boy who hurt Callie or turning off the TV so that Alexandra won’t cry over someone dying in “Grey’s Anatomy,” a show all of my sisters obsess over and in which a main character seems to die every other episode.

With Amelia, the tears hit me harder, though it makes no sense. I both want to pull her into my arms and also go hunt down Drew and tear his head off. Probably but not definitely metaphorically speaking.

I choose the hug instead.

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