Audrey wiped her eyes and looked between the two of them, admitting the truth she’d been running from for God knows how long.

She took a deep breath. “I think I’m in love with Clarke.”

Naomi sighed and pulled her in for a hug, petting her head. “Oh, sweetheart. Of course you are.”

Chapter Twenty-Three

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 18

Good God, what is that?” Clarke asked, coming up to the kitchen table and looking over her shoulder.

She made a scoffing noise. “The seating arrangements. Obviously.”

“It looks like you’re planning a war,” he said dubiously. “And that yellow is definitely going to annihilate pink.”

“What?” she asked, writing a name onto a mini yellow Post-it note and tapping it against her lip, trying to figure out if she should place her cousin who couldn’t go five minutes without mentioning the Yankees with Clarke’s sports-loving colleagues, or with his own family who loved him but hated baseball.

“It just seems to me that the two lone pink guys don’t stand a chance,” Clarke said, pointing to the center of the poster board serving as her makeshift seating chart.

“That’s us,” she said. “See, we’re at the center table, and everyone else—in yellow, just one color since I’m not differentiating our two sides—is at bigger tables situated around us. Honestly, you’ve been to like nine hundred weddings, how do you not know about the concept of the head table?”

“Huh. I guess I never really noticed the bride and groom.”

“Wonderful,” Audrey said sarcastically. “Your bride is such a lucky girl.”

He planted an almost absent kiss on the top of her head. “As long as she knows it.”

She knows it.

It was enough, Audrey reminded herself, the same way she had been for the past week and a half, ever since her breakdown in the dress shop. It was enough. It would have to be.

After a three-hour-long conversation with Naomi and Claire, she’d come to the decision that when you loved someone, you took them how you could get them. You loved them the way they deserved to be loved, even if they couldn’t love you back in that same way.

Not yet, she reminded herself.

Guys can be dumb, Claire assured her. Even the good ones Give him time.

Girls can be dumb, too, Naomi had added. Oliver and I never would have gotten our fairy tale without a whole lot of patience on his part.

Patience. She could do patience

Clarke was worth it. They were worth it.

“Dare I hope that the fact that the seating chart is in my kitchen means you’re leaning toward living here after the big day?” he asked hopefully, wandering back into the kitchen for more coffee.

“Nope,” Audrey said, resuming her sticky note planning. “But I needed a big table, and mine’s currently covered in handwritten notes for the wedding favors.”