Page 159 of The Book of Summer

“Excuse me?”

“He’s not right for you. Not one bit.”

“Oh, he’s not, is he?”

What an intrusion. What galling pompousness. As if Bess would care what the bastard thought, a man who jettisoned her years ago in favor of an ill-advised sojourn to Central America.

“Who is ‘right’ for me, then?” she asked. “Someone more like you, I presume?”

Bess was being catty, purposefully rude, but some speck of her hoped that he might say “Yes.” As she waited for his response, the speck began to grow.

“No,” Evan said. “Not like me. We’ve moved on, haven’t we?”

“Yes,” Bess said, and gave him a hard scowl. “We have. I don’t know what this is about but I’m quite comfortable in my choice.”

She wasn’t, not at all. But it was what had been decided, the fitting course. Anyhow, Brandon was great. Handsome. Successful. Loving and protective. Or that’s how Bess regarded him then: in the best and most determined light.

“If you’ll excuse me,” she said. “I have to see a man about an altar.”

With that, she slammed the door in Evan’s face. It was the last Bess saw of him until a week ago.

“When you came to my bedroom door,” Bess says now, as Evan glides her across the floor, “and said not to marry Brandon, I thought you were being difficult. Or argumentative. Until you gave me the entry, I didn’t think it was because you…”

“Because I loved you,” he answers for her. “And I still love you. I’ve loved you for my entire adult life, and then some.”

Bess’s eyes sting as the tears again form. She can’t believe what he’s saying to her, at this moment, in the very last second of everything.

“That’s what my mom said about your dad,” she tells him. “Almost verbatim.”

“How cute. We could double-date. You should know, on that day Cissy told me not to stop you. Obviously I didn’t listen.”

“She did?”

Bess’s eyebrows lift.

“Yep. I went to her, crying like a baby. It was pathetic. I had plans for some big confession, a declaration of love. She told me it wasn’t fair, that I should’ve done it long ago and I ‘had plenty of chances, sonny.’ Leaving you to your day was the right thing to do. She was not wrong.”

“Well,” Bess says, her breath shaking in her chest. “She was and she wasn’t.”

The right thing to do. Bess is beginning to think that in most circumstances there’s no such thing.

“And don’t think I haven’t noticed,” Evan says. “I’ve used the word ‘love’ approximately twelve times in the last three minutes and you haven’t replied once. That’s okay, though, because I know you feel the same.”

Bess smiles and thinks about this for a bit.Pretendsto think about it, because the answer is clear.

“Yes,” she says. “I do.”

Just as Bess goes to make a joke (“If this is a ploy for sex, remember, I just got out of the hospital”), the doors suddenly whoosh open and a gale blows in. It’s Cissy in a short red dress, Chappy on her arm.

Chappy! Her dad! Bess scoots out of Evan’s hold and turns to look for Dudley. He is across the way, coming in from enjoying a cigar outside.

With a hard glare aimed at Cissy, Dudley takes a terse sip of bourbon. This perfect night, made even more perfect by the fact that it followed Bess’s very worst day, this night is about to end in catastrophe. Damn Cissy. You don’t bring your boyfriend to a wedding that your husband is already at. That’s just straight etiquette.

“Fuck,” Bess says.

Her father closes the door behind him and beats a hot path toward Cissy and her date. Dudley lurches at Cissy and then cloaks her in what can only be described as a friendly embrace. While Bess stands stunned and blinking, her father does the unthinkable. He shakes Chappy’s hand. Proof that the world will never make sense.

The reunion breaks up. Chappy beelines toward one bar, Dudley the other (nottoochummy, thank God). Bess turns to Evan.

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