Page 2 of My Ex-Best Friend's Wedding

I take a conscious breath, counting slowly to seven then holding it before I exhale to a count of ten. This is supposed to clear your mind and help you turn your thoughts in a more pleasant, affirmative direction. I’m not any better at this than I am at not thinking, but I finally manage to pull up an image of Spencer, the man I’ve been dating for almost a year now, three months longer than I’ve dated anyone since I came to New York. He’s a successful playwright and songwriter with a string of hit Broadway musicals to his credit. He understands what being on deadline means and he’s every bit as driven as I am, only way better at disguising it.

I let myself try to imagine the surprise birthday dinner he’s planning. I inhale again, even more slowly this time. I’ve spent more than a few birthdays alone since I arrived here just after my twenty-first and am beyond glad to have someone to face down forty with.

I was supposed to come to New York with Brianna, my best friend in the world; a friend who felt more like a sister from the day we met in kindergarten and discovered we were born on the same day. (We were both wearing paper crowns at the time.)

We practically lived in each other’s houses while we were growing up. When we were in high school her grandmother died and her archaeologist parents went on yet another dig on yet another continent and never really came back and she moved in with us.

Bree and I inhaled books and dreamed of being writers. We wrote our first illustrated fairy tale together in second grade and turned it into a graphic romance novel when we were fourteen. We brainstormed and wrote part of a work of historical fiction while we were in high school and plotted out a contemporary novel set on our favorite beach in the Outer Banks in college. We planned to move to New York right after we graduated from college and find an apartment to share, and we were bothgoing to get jobs to support us while we wrote the novel we’d plotted.

Two days before we were supposed to take the bus to New York, Bree pulled out without warningorany real explanation. It was a betrayal of everything we’d dreamed and planned our entire lives and all she said was, “Sorry, I changed my mind.” Like she’d decided to order iced tea instead of Coke or thought she’d pass on dessert. I didn’t know a soul in New York. I climbed onto the bus with wobbly knees, scared to death.

New York City is intimidating in its own right. Alone and without money it can be hard, cold, and inhospitable. A place to be survived through sheer force of will.

I was barely hanging on by my fingertips three months later, when I heard that Bree was dating Clay Williams, my boyfriend all through high school and most of college.

Six months later they were engaged. Even though we were barely speaking I tried to warn her that Clay was nowhere near ready to settle down; something I did out of the remnants of friendship and that she interpreted as jealousy. Then, although she’s not a blood relative, she wore THE DRESS that’s been in my family forever. And my mother forced me to be her maid of honor, because of some stupid promise and a pinky swear we made each other in kindergarten.

If that’s not a novel, I don’t know what is.

Bree

Two days to forty

Manteo, North Carolina

“Mary? Are you there?” The voice sounds tinny as if it’s coming from a great distance, which it pretty much always is.The voice belongs to the woman who gave birth to me. She and my father are somewhere in the Middle East. Or possibly in sub-Saharan Africa. Or maybe the Galápagos on some archaeological dig or another.

I was named after Mary Leakey, the famous fossil hunter, whom I’ve always hated because my parents clearly loved fossils and hunting for them more than they ever loved me.

I was five when I stopped answering to Mary and insisted on being called Brianna, which is my middle name. That was when my parents, who’d been dragging me from one archaeological dig to another, brought me to live with my grandmother Brianna in her house in Manteo on Roanoke Island so that they could continue to wander. My grandmother died just after my sixteenth birthday, forcing my parents to come back to bury her. They stayed long enough to decide that I was old enough to live on my own in the house she’d left me while they finished the dig they’d been in the middle of. After that they took turns coming back on occasion though I never sensed any method or thought to their comings and goings. If it hadn’t been for Kendra and Lauren Jameson marching over and packing up my things and insisting I move in with them, I’m not sure what sort of pathetic hermit I might have turned into.

“I’m calling to wish you a happy birthday. Your father’s out of cell phone range but I didn’t want to miss this opportunity.”

“Oh, right. Thanks.” There’s no way of knowing whether she realizes my birthday’s not for two days yet. Or if the time difference where she is somehow makes up the gap. Or maybe she had the chance to call and realized it was close enough to my birthday to count. I really don’t know and every year it matters less. My birth story is a little murky. I’ve heard that she was on an island off the coast of California searching for signs of Late Pleistocene Paleocoastal peoples when she went into labor and simply had me there in the sand before going back to work like Russian peasant women used to do back in the day. But insteadof tying me in a sling to her bosom she handed me over to an assistant.

“Do you have special plans?”

“Oh, you know, the usual.” This is a gibe because I can’t remember more than a handful of birthdays my biological parents were around for. Which is undoubtedly why I’ve made a big fuss and party for each and every one of my children’s birthdays, including Lily’s sweet sixteen last year.

“What’s wrong?” she asks, as if we’veeverhad a comfortable conversation since I became aware that I was never even a contender in the competition between my parents’ love of their work and their love of me.

“Nothing. It’s just that I’m at the store. And I can’t really talk right now.” This is a lie, but I can’t bring myself to come out and tell her that her occasional awkward attempts to communicate just make me feel worse.

“Oh, that’s nice.” They’ve seen my bookstore, Title Waves, a handful of times. The same for their grandchildren.

“Thanks for the call.”

I’d pace if the store weren’t so crowded with bookshelves and display tables. I settle for breathing deeply and telling myself that an unsatisfying phone call is better than no call at all. Then I tell myself that turning forty isn’t that big a deal. Ultimately, I do what I always do when I’m unhappy. Or nervous. Or angry. I pull my laptop out of my bag, boot it up, and open the manuscript file. I empty my mind and let go of my hurt and irritation as I read the scene I wrote last night when the house was finally quiet and I could sit down in the attic room I’ve claimed for my office. It’s not as bad as it felt while I was writing it. I read the scene again. Then I begin to cut and paste, which is when I realize what’s missing. I lean forward and begin to type. Everything else disappears as a picture of my characters forms in my mind. Heath would never take Whitney for granted or forget to bring home the paper towels like he promised.

“No, don’t go. I can’t bear for you to go.” His smile was wry, his tone self-deprecating. His blue eyes gleamed with...

The bell on the front door jangles. My fingers freeze on the keyboard. It takes a few long seconds to blink myself back to the present.

“Good day, Brianna.” Margaret McKinnon is a lovely woman of about eighty-five, an avid reader who loves books almost as much as I do and cannot bring herself to read in any format that doesn’t involve paper. She’s been a regular since I started working in this very bookstore as a teenager. She’s one of my best customers and will come in to help out or even take a shift when I need to take time off or the student who works part time has a conflict. I make it a point to keep her favorite authors, and any that resemble them, stocked. Which means lots and lots of historical fiction and the occasional erotic novel disguised as a romance. Recently she’s begun to wade into fantasy.

Since her husband died five months ago she’s been coming in more frequently and staying longer. Some people drown their sorrows and losses in drugs and alcohol. Mrs. McKinnon drowns hers in the written word, which is an escape I can relate to.

“It’s lovely out, isn’t it?” she asks with forced enthusiasm. “March can be so unpredictable.”

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