Even as I say it, I feel a pang of unpleasantness in my stomach, different from the stress-vomiting feeling. Bad enough that I’d done this in the first place, now I’m going to gaslight him about it? Gross. This reminds me of a plotline from Troilus and Cressida, or maybe it reminds me of something closer to home.

“No.” It’s the most emphatic syllable he’s uttered since he walked through the door, and he raises his eyes from the program so he’s looking right at me, and there. That’s it, that’s what had made me think Reid Sutherland seemed lost, sad. That look in his eyes.

“I see it,” he says. “I know patterns.”

I feel my own brow crinkle at the way he’s said this, as though I’d been dumb enough to hide the word MISTAKE in the wedding program of the guy who invented Morse code or something.

“Aren’t you a banker?” I ask. I’ve got a vague memory of Avery saying something about Reid working on Wall Street, which I functionally understand as a beeswarm of bankers, a bunch of black- and navy-suited people with dollar signs in their eyes instead of pupils.

“I’m a quant,” he says, as if that explains everything.

“A what?”

He shakes his head minutely, answers quickly. “Math models for investments. Risk management. Numbers, code. You know what I mean.”

Uh, I do not know what he means. He said “math models” and all I could think of was the time my tenth-grade geometry teacher built a cube out of cafeteria straws and silly putty. I’m guessing that’s not the kind of work Reid does.

“Sure,” I say, which is, interestingly, also what I told Mr. Mes-teller when he asked if I understood his lesson with the straws and silly putty. I got a D in geometry.

There’s a stretch of silence. It feels long, but it must be only a matter of seconds, that program lying between us like a headstone. Inscription, not frolicsome: Here lies everything you’ve worked for. Dead by your own unruly, interfering hand.

I take a silent breath through my nose before I speak again.

“I’m sorry to hear about your divorce.”

“There’s no divorce. I didn’t—we didn’t have the wedding.”

So, forget getting sick in the trash can. I’ll just move in there like the piece of garbage I truly am.

“I am so—”

“It’s not because of this,” he says, touching the corner of the program again before tucking his hands back in his pockets and taking a small step back. “Or rather, it’s not only because of this.”

I wonder if I could fit a blanket with me in the trash can. I definitely do not deserve a pillow.

“But I would still like to know. I would like to know how you knew.”