“More fun than it was for Georgia Robeson,” said Louanne. “But she never learns. Tomorrow she’ll get him out of jail and refuse to press charges, and about Labor Day we’ll go through the whole thing again. I’ll never understand women who go looking for exactly the wrong man to marry.” She seemed to remember that John was about to get married himself and threw him an apologetic smile. “Caroline being one of the exceptions, of course.”

“Of course,” John said.

He got out near campus to walk the last block in the twilight, thinking about Caroline and the choices she had made. She would be coming home tomorrow or the day after, and they would have to sort it all out between them. He might say, I went about this all wrong, and I couldn’t be the husband that you deserve to have. Which was only part of the truth, but she deserved all of it. If she wanted a play-by-play confession, he’d give that to her, too, because he might be stupid at times, but he couldn’t be a coward about this. That would be unfair to everybody.

He’d take the blame, pay the bills, make the phone calls. The long list of wedding plans in reverse: cancel the caterers, the church, the flowers, the honeymoon, send back the presents. He’d be the one to tell people to stay home, the wedding was off.

John stopped just where he was, overcome by a jolt of guilt so great that his stomach cramped with it.

On the other side of all that was Angie, or the hope of her. There was a long list of potentially troublesome practical questions that had to do with logistics and jobs and where they would be spending their time. To all that, Angie had added another item, one he hadn’t let himself think about.

They had been pinned together on the old couch on the Ivy House porch, the night breeze gentle on his sweaty skin, when she had put her forehead against his. “You’re going to be mad, at some point,” she had said, “when you realize what you’ve thrown away for me.”

It had taken him by surprise, but it shouldn’t have. Angie had a way of cutting to the bone, and he was smart enough to recognize the truth, even if he didn’t know what to do about it.

John let himself into the house, cool and dim with the shades drawn against the afternoon sun. There was a scattering of half-filled moving boxes and packing paper, a pile of math books on the coffee table, and a note on the table next to the phone.