Focus! “It needs to find its way to the beach. Pronto.”

“Yes ma’am.” His salute was unhurried.

Before she could offer a retort, her cell phone pealed and buzzed simultaneously, and she pulled it from her capri pocket.

“Hello?”

“Kate?”

“Bryan.” Turning away from Lucas and toward the door, she eyed a crude desk with a metal folding chair that bore countless rusty scratches. “Good morning.” A smile crept into her voice. It was their wedding day. The day they’d planned for nearly two years. “Did you sleep well?” She hadn’t. She’d rumpled the sheets until nearly two o’clock, but that was to be expected.

The silence on the other end, however, was not. “Bryan?” Had she lost the signal?

“Um, Kate, did you get my message?”

There’d been a blinking red light this morning. She’d assumed it was Pam’s voice mail and hadn’t checked. Suddenly, she wished she had.

“No. What’s wrong?”

“Are you sitting down?”

“No, I’m not sitting down. Just tell me.” An ugly dread snaked down her spine and settled there, coiled and waiting.

“I’m on my way back to Boston,” he said. “I left a message this morning. You must’ve had your phone off.”

Kate’s stomach stirred. She stared at the wall in front of her—a pegboard with a zillion holes, metal prongs poking from it, tools and cords everywhere. “What happened?” Some emergency, maybe?

What emergency could trump our wedding?

“I can’t marry you, Kate.”

The words dropped, each one crumbling under its own weight. The stirring in her stomach intensified. “That’s not funny, Bryan.” It was a terrible joke. He’d never been good with jokes. His punch lines left you leaning forward, waiting for the rest.

“I’m in love with someone else.”

Pain. A huge wooden spoon, tossing the contents of her stomach. Her legs wobbled, trembling on the wedge heels of her sandals, and she clutched the cold metal of the folding chair. “What?” Was that her voice, weak and thready? Someone had vacuumed all the moisture from her mouth, sucked the air from her lungs.

“I’m so sorry,” Bryan was saying. “I know this is awful. You don’t deserve this, but I can’t marry you. It happened slowly, and I didn’t realize what was going on until recently. I tried to put it out of my mind, but I just can’t. And I can’t marry you knowing how I feel. I’m so sorry, Kate.”

“What?” It was the only word her mind could form at the moment.

“I know there’s no excuse. I should have told you before now, but I thought it would go away. I thought I was just having cold feet or something, but it’s more than that.”

“We’ve been together for two years, Bryan.”