My phone buzzed and a text came in from Bridget. It was a photograph. A photograph of Tom looking furtive with his arm around a pretty young woman. A pretty young woman who wasn’t Bridget. For which there must have been a million reasonable explanations that a person who hadn’t spent most of his adult life developing deep-seated trust issues could have articulated. Unfortunately, Bridget had called me.

“Crap, Bridge,” I said finally. The trick here was to walk the line between being supportive and encouraging her to blow up her own wedding. And I could do that. I could do that. I just had to be nice and as noncommittal as possible and ignore the part of my brain that was screaming, She’s doomed, and so are you. Meeting Miles was a sign, and everything you think you can count on is wrong. “I’m so sorry. Have you…” What would an emotionally mature and undamaged person do? “Have you talked to him about it?”

There was a burbling sound from the other end of the line that eventually resolved into “I can’t get hold of him.”

On its own, that wasn’t unusual. Tom’s job often required him to go quiet for a couple of days, sometimes longer. But it wasn’t exactly reassuring. Or at least I wasn’t reassured, and I didn’t think Bridge would be either. I tried to stick with neutral questions. “How did you get the picture?”

“Liz saw them.”

If it had been any of Bridge’s other friends it might have been less damning, because a lot of them were like, well, me. The type of people who jumped from fearing the worst to deciding that the worst had definitely happened without even needing a run-up. But Liz was a legit vicar, which meant giving people the benefit of the doubt was basically in her job description. And since she was actually officiating at the wedding, it didn’t seem likely she’d be maliciously sabotaging it. “Did she say anything else?”

“Just that they were in a café together and they looked…looked close.”

There were still, surely, other ways to interpret an about-to-be-married man with his phone switched off carrying on in a café with a mysterious hot lady who wasn’t his fiancée. I just couldn’t think of any right at that second. “Do you need me to come over?”

“Don’t you”—Bridge gave a sort of noble hiccough—“aren’t you going out with Oliver tonight?”

Yes. Yes, I was. And it was going to be super romantic and special and all the things that fancy date nights with your long-term partner were supposed to be. “This is more important.”