“What?” Hannah asked, fighting a yawn. “I don’t understand.”

“It was the first night we were at Tom’s parents’ house on the Cape. Everyone had gone to sleep. You were in one of the guest rooms by yourself. I was down the hall. Anyway, in the middle of the night I got up to go to the bathroom, and I saw Rob just standing in front of your door. He was just staring at it and scowling, like he was angry with himself. Eventually he just walked back to his own room and shut the door behind him. I guess I knew then, and it all made sense. But by then it was too late. He was back in Austin the next week.”

“But,” Bee continued, “I thought maybe he’d wind up knocking on your door this weekend. I mean, that was my hope, that he’d find the courage.”

Hannah kept her eyes on Bee as she stood up from the bed, Joe following her lead. Hannah started to speak but silenced herself. She simply stared at the bride, her eyes wide. She let out long yawn.

“Sleep,” Bee said. Joe reached down and straightened Bee’s dress, which had shifted awkwardly while she was sitting.

“Thanks, Bee,” Hannah said, clumsily getting under the covers, her formal dress hanging out from under the bed sheet.

“Oh, wait!” Hannah called out as Joe and Bee walked toward the door. “Can one of you grab my BlackBerry from my bag? I just need to check one thing.”

Joe leaned over and fished through Hannah’s personal belongings to find the shiny silver BlackBerry with the red leather cover. He placed the apparatus in front of her.

Hannah grabbed it and began pushing buttons until she found what she was looking for, a text sent at ten o’clock from a 310 area code.

Hannah read it, leaned back, and placed the phone next to her on the bed. She closed her eyes and bit her bottom lip. “She said yes,” Hannah finally mumbled, almost too quietly for Joe and Bee to hear. “She’s in.”

“Who?” Joe asked.

“Natalie,” Hannah barely responded, her breathing already slow and heavy.

“Who’s Natalie?” Bee and Joe asked in unison.

But Hannah was already asleep, her mouth closed and curving up at the edges.

Rob

Rob was dirty. He didn’t smell—at least not like body odor, as far as he could tell—but he was filthy, his clothes marked with dark stains, his face covered in mud, dirt, and blood.

By the time he’d booked his last-minute red-eye to BWI, from which he would take a 6:00 a.m. shuttle to Annapolis, Rob only had a half hour to get to the airport. There had been no time to shower and, anyway, his bathroom still looked like a crime scene. It would have taken him hours to mop up Liz’s blood and to remove the glass shards from the tub so it was safe to step into, so he skipped bathing altogether.