“There is a bridal luncheon for Caroline on Thursday,” Kai said. “Do you think it will be canceled?”

“And the bachelor party,” said Rob. “What about that?”

“Hell if I know,” John said.

He felt vaguely nauseated and completely hollow, in spite of the fact that he had eaten the entire dinner Kai put before him. He spent more than five hours behind the wheel today, which was part of it, but mostly his mental state had to do with Caroline, and the fact that he had never had so much as five minutes alone with her all day. Not even when she had announced her intention of going off to the retreat for the rest of the week. Junie Rose had been delighted, Miss Zula had seen it as a reasonable thing to do, and thus it had been settled.

There had been a moment, a mere fraction of a second, when Caroline had looked at him and he could have objected. For any number of reasons he could have objected, the first and most important being the fact that they were getting married on Saturday. He could have asked to talk to her in private for a few minutes—he should have done just that—but instead he had met her gaze and then let his own slip away, across the parlor of Miss Junie’s summer cottage to fix on the view out the window and a single sailboat on the lake.

Two hours later she had climbed out of the car in front of the convent with a small suitcase—John had time enough to wonder when she had packed it before she had come around to his side of the car and kissed him, a brief touch of her mouth.

“Thank you,” she said to him. “Thank you for understanding. This is what I need just now.”

But he didn’t understand, and how could he? The last real conversation he had had with her was at Rob’s open house, which was less than twenty-four hours earlier and seemed at least a year. Because, of course, that party had been before the disaster on the baseball field and the mass exodus to the emergency room. It had been before he kissed Angie. Just now the world and all time could be qualified by the direction in which it flowed: up to the moment when he kissed Angie and she kissed him back, and then away from that moment.

As he turned the car toward Ogilvie and home, he realized that he remembered very little of that conversation in the crowded living room when Caroline had wanted to dance. He searched his mind and came up with no more than fragments: bridal jitters and everybody has doubts.