Rafe, it turned out, would have nothing to do with helping to figure out the breakup’s cause. “Not a chance,” he said, when I asked him to ask Ash. “If you want to know, you ask him.”

“I did. He wouldn’t tell me.”

“Well, there you go.”

By then we were halfway through our tall-stack sandwiches. I looked at him over the top of my ham, turkey, and provolone with avocado on sourdough. “There I go what?”

“If you’ve already asked him and got nothing back, why do you think I’d get a different response?”

I sighed. Sometimes he could be ridiculous. “Because you’re a guy. Guy-guy conversations are different from girl-guy. He might tell you something he wouldn’t tell me, and if you tell me, maybe between us we can figure out what to do.”

He eyed me. “What if there’s nothing that will fix this? Which is pretty likely.”

“Then we have to accept that fact. But what if there’s some silly misunderstanding? What if we can help?”

“Mmm,” he said, sounding a bit like Eddie. “Fine. I’ll ask. Once.”

“Thank you.” I gave him a brilliant smile. “You’re the best fiancé I’ve ever had.”

He looked up from the packet of horseradish he was squishing onto his roast beef sandwich. Two packets had already gone in, but apparently that wasn’t enough. “I like that I’ve been picked from a pool of one for that honor.”

“If you want, I can get you a medal.” I amused myself by thinking about the possibilities. On a ribbon or a pinned version? Ribbon. Definitely a ribbon. And shiny. You could order pretty much anything off the Internet, but I bet the local print shop would do something fun for me, especially if I told them who it was for.

I was more than halfway through a mental design of the award when Rafe nodded at something behind me.

“See who just came in? No, don’t look,” he said, maddeningly, because how could I see who’d come in if I didn’t turn around? “It’s Ian Breece. No mistaking that hair.”

Without pausing to think, not about what I was going to say or the possible consequences or how I was going to quell Rafe’s irritation, I stood and went to the counter, where Ian was ordering two club sandwiches to go.

“Ian, right?” I asked, smiling up at him. “Minnie Hamilton. We talked the other day about a party for Kristen.” Which had ended on a sour note, but maybe Ian’s memory was like mine.

“How are you doing?” he asked in his big, booming voice.