That’s when Rob found the place he’d been living in for about eight months now. It was a smaller house that rented for eight hundred dollars a month. Less for more and in a less-desirable neighborhood—but unlike the old apartment it sat on a half-acre backyard.

“It’s for Liz. So she can have her seizures,” Rob had told Ben, one of his closer friends in Austin, who occasionally stopped by for beers, when he wasn’t with his wife or touring with his band.

“How romantic,” Ben had said.

When Rob thought about going to Bee’s wedding, he’d considered Liz and what he would do with her for an entire weekend. He could ask his brother to come down to Austin to watch her. Jeremy lived in Dallas and was always looking for a way to escape from his family.

But just as he’d never booked a ticket to Maryland, he’d never called his brother. It was for the best, Rob thought. He didn’t trust Jeremy not to bail on the dog for a night out with his old friends from college.

Rob shook his head and reached for his phone. He was right to have stayed in Austin. But maybe he should call Hannah back, just to give her another pep talk and to find out about everyone else from school. He picked up the phone, scrolled to the only name programmed into it, and dialed just one more time.

Nancy Phil

The ride from Baltimore to Annapolis felt longer than it should.

Only about thirty miles separated the Maryland cities, but warm weather, even in September, scrambled traffic patterns. Phil found himself idling in each of the towns along the route, listening intently to the radio traffic reports. Glen Burnie. Severn. Parole, which he imagined as a town inhabited by ex-cons. Phil had probably been to some of these towns for high school basketball tournaments, but the intervening years had erased all memory of them.

Since moving to Baltimore after college, Phil hadn’t left the city much. He was a twenty-minute drive from his childhood home, where his mother still lived, with a Newfoundland puppy, which had replaced her last Newfoundland, which had replaced the one before it.

Phil’s condo, which he bought almost seven years ago, on his thirty-second birthday, was a short walk from his job at Camden Yards, though he never traveled to the ballpark by foot. His hometown felt less safe to him than New York, Philly, or any of the other cities he’d visited for games. Phil’s stature didn’t help matters. Being six foot six and broad shouldered came in handy at the ballpark, where he was in charge of security, but on the street Phil believed his height and lumberjack’s build made him a target. People assumed he was a tough guy, which he wasn’t.

Phil now spotted signs for Annapolis, which meant he’d be on time for the wedding. It was probably a good thing, even though Phil would have gladly skipped the ceremony and arrived just in time for the reception. He was only going to this wedding because his mother couldn’t. Technically, he wasn’t even invited to the wedding. It was his mom, Nancy MacGowan, who was a dear friend of the groom’s mother. The now-sixtysomething women had been inseparable when they lived in the same town, back when Phil was a teenager and the groom’s family, the Fees, spent two years living in the Baltimore suburbs so they could expand their family business from North Carolina to Maryland and Virginia. All these years later the women did the best they could to see each other as often as possible, which wasn’t much.