Chapter 1 The Worst Best Day

Cleo's POV

I told my mother not to schedule a wedding on a Saturday.

She did it anyway. And now I'm standing in front of a mirror with foundation on my only good dress, twenty minutes before she marries a man I have known for eight months, and I cannot stop my hands from shaking.

Not because I'm nervous.

Because I found something this morning.

It was in Mom's top drawer, under her scarves, where she hides everything she thinks I won't look for. An envelope. My name on the front in handwriting I haven't seen in seven years. My father's handwriting.

I didn't open it. I put it back exactly how I found it and walked to the bathroom and turned the shower on cold and stood there until my brain went quiet.

So that's where I am right now. Cold. Quiet. Holding it together with both hands while my mother marries Weston Cole in our backyard, and somewhere in this house, there is a letter from a man who walked out when I was ten years old and never once looked back.

I tell myself I will think about it later.

I tell myself a lot of things.

The backyard is small and full of people I don't know. Weston's work friends. His sister is from Maryland. Neighbors I've never spoken to. They're all smiling the way people smile at weddings, wide and easy, like everything is already fine.

My mom looks beautiful. That's the part that gets me. She is standing at the front in her cream dress with her hair pinned up, and she is glowing in this way I haven't seen in years. She looks the way she used to look before Dad left. Before the night shifts. Before she started eating dinner standing at the kitchen counter because sitting down felt like too much.

She looks happy. And I want to be happy for her. I am trying to be happy for her.

But that envelope is sitting in a drawer twenty feet above my head, and I cannot think about anything else.

Weston's son finds me by the lemonade table.

Prentice Cole is seventeen, one of those people who smiles first and asks questions after, and he has been trying to make me feel like we are real siblings since the day our parents introduced us. He is not bad at it. That is the most I will say.

"You good?" he asks.

"Great," I say.

He looks at me like he doesn't believe it, but decides not to push. Smart. We have learned each other's limits over eight months. He bumps my shoulder once and lets it go.

"My best friend just showed up," he says. "Come meet him. He'll make you laugh, I promise."

"I don't want to laugh."

"Cleo."

"Prentice."

He gives me the look. The one who is patient and faintly annoying. I set down my lemonade.

"Fine," I say. "One minute."

I follow him around the side of the house, and that is where I see him.

Tall. Dark eyes. Leaning against the wall with his hands in his pockets, like he has been standing there for years, and finds it comfortable.

My brain does the thing where it recognizes someone before the rest of me catches up.

Then it catches up.

Dash Calloway.

I know that face. I know it in the specific way you know the face of someone who embarrassed you in front of twelve people and walked away without apologizing. Two years ago. Junior debate prep at Hartfield High. He was a senior. I was a sophomore who had worked on my argument for three weeks. I stood up and gave it everything I had.

He took it apart in four minutes. Methodical. Calm. Almost bored. And when I tried to come back at him, he tilted his head and said, "That's a good point. It's just not the right one." Then he smiled. Just a little. Like he was trying not to.

The room laughed.

I sat down and did not speak again for the rest of the session.

I have thought about that moment more than I will ever admit to anyone alive.

And now he is at my mother's wedding. Standing in my backyard. Looking at me with his head tilted slightly, like he is running me through something in his brain.

Like he is trying to place me.

I do not help him.

"Dash, this is Cleo," Prentice says. "My stepsister."

Something moves across Dash's face. Quick. Gone before I can name it.

"Cleo," he says. Like he is testing the word.

"Dash," I say. Like it's nothing.

We look at each other for exactly one second too long.

Then the wedding music starts, and Prentice pulls me toward the chairs, and the moment breaks, and I sit down in the front row next to a woman I've never met and watch my mother walk toward her future.

I should be watching her.

Instead, I am thinking about the way Dash Calloway looked at me like he almost remembered.

The ceremony is twenty minutes long. My mom cries. Weston cries. Prentice pretends he isn't crying and wipes his face with his sleeve when he thinks no one is watching.

I watch my mother say I do, and I feel something crack open in my chest, something I can't name, something that has nothing to do with the wedding and everything to do with the envelope upstairs and the handwriting on the front of it and the seven years of silence before it.

After, when the guests are eating, and the music is too loud and no one is looking at me, I slip inside.

I go upstairs.

I open the drawer.

The envelope is still there.

I pick it up. My hands are shaking again. I turn it over. Sealed. My name in his handwriting. The postmark is from three weeks ago.

I am about to tear it open when I hear a floorboard creak behind me.

I spin around.

Dash Calloway is standing in the doorway of my mother's bedroom.

He looks at the envelope in my hands.

He looks at my face.

And I watch his expression shift from surprise into something quieter, something careful, like he just walked into a room and understood exactly what he interrupted.

"Sorry," he says. "I was looking for the bathroom."

I don't say anything. I can't. My throat is locked up tight.

He doesn't move.

Neither do I.

And then he says, very quietly, like he already knows the answer won't be good: "Is that from who I think it's from?"

My blood goes cold.

Because there is only one way Dash Calloway could know anything about that envelope.

Which means someone told him.

And the only person in this house who knows about my father,

Is my mother.