I stop myself, feeling Reid’s posture change beside me, a straightening that puts a slice of space between us. I look up at him, notice that his face has lost all the softness of before as he looks straight ahead. He is Masterpiece Theatre Reid. Many-months-ago Reid.

I follow his eyes.

For a good five seconds—five this-feels-like-being-buried-alive seconds—not a single one of us in this terrible eye-contact triangle moves.

Avery Coster looks exactly the way I remember her—beautiful and composed, but not cold or distant. Everything she’s wearing looks plain but also deeply expensive: a lightweight cream sweater, a pair of cropped, dove-gray pants, pale-pink slides that don’t—in spite of where she’s standing right this second—look like they’ve ever seen the surface of a New York City street. Either she just had a blowout or she has made a deal with a being from the underworld in exchange for her mortal soul.

Reid clears his throat, and all of us take a step forward, as though we’ve all simply accepted that this isn’t allowed to be only an eye-contact meeting.

“Meg,” Reid says. “You remember Avery.”

I say nothing. I don’t even nod and smile. I am absolutely shocked; I feel as though I’ve walked into another dimension. In this particular dimension the hemline of your dress is wasted with city street dirt and you can’t remember when you washed your hair last and there’s a high-calorie dessert called a Salty Pimp running down your left hand when you run into—in a city of almost two million people!—the ex-fiancée of the man you’re currently sleeping with.

This dimension is called Absolute Bullshit.

“Hi!” I blurt, happy to at least have recovered my powers of speech. “Yes, of course I remember. Hi.”

Not great powers, alas.

“Meg,” Avery says politely, her eyes not once looking at my ice-cream cone. “It’s very nice to see you again.”

It doesn’t sound chilly, or false. It sounds . . . nice. As though she doesn’t mind running into Reid at all. As though she doesn’t mind running into him with me, a woman who designed the invitation for her wedding—their wedding—that never happened. If she was uncomfortable or surprised at first, that seems to have entirely faded away.

“Oh! Oh, same. It’s great to see you, too.”

“Business is good?”

“Yeah, it’s great. Thank you.”

She gives me a genuine nod, a genuine smile. “That’s wonderful. So many of my friends were so disappointed that you got out of the wedding business before they had their big days. Please reach out if you’re ever back in it.”