“That too.” Lucy winked at John. “Y’all missed one hell of a party yesterday.”

“So Miss Junie tells me.” He turned to his brother. “How did Caroline seem to you?”

“Transformed,” Rob said. “She wouldn’t let anybody leave. Insisted they all stay and have a good time. I know I did. Or I would have, if I hadn’t been worried about you.”

Lucy and Kai laughed at Rob openly, until he held up his hands to ask for mercy.

Angie said, “Will somebody please give me the highlights?”

John was glad to see Angie relax as Lucy and Kai worked together, the oddest relay team imaginable, to reconstruct the non-wedding of the season at Old Roses. She was leaning against him, her skin cool against his, and John was sorry that she had found his phone, even sorrier that Tony had showed up to reclaim his condoms. They’d have to stop at the drugstore on the way home.

“Now, my personal favorite part would have to be when Patty-Cake fainted dead away,” Lucy was saying. “Just as Caroline said she was moving north to start cooking school, Patty-Cake went down for the count.”

“I think Tony got that on video,” Rob said. “You’ll be able to see it for yourself.”

“I’m looking forward to it,” John said. “Almost as much as I am to her resignation.”

“So now what will you two do?” Kai said cheerfully, looking from John to Angie and back again. “Everybody thinks you ran away together, of course. “

Angie said, “Oh, great.” John could feel her tense, humming like an electric current where their arms touched.

Lucy leaned over and squeezed her hand. “Sugar, I have been coping with Ogilvie gossips for all of my life, and my best advice is this: Don’t disappoint them.”

Rob groaned, but Lucy ignored him. “If they want to believe you two have run off together, then run off. It will make them happy and stop the talk quicker than trying to convince them otherwise. Beyond that, everybody loves a happy ending, and you two certainly deserve one.”

“Unless you do not want to be together,” Kai said, equably. “In which case, such a solution would be counterproductive.”

Angie took a deep breath, while John found he could hardly breathe at all, wondering what was about to go wrong. She sat up very straight, took one of John’s hands between her own, and squeezed it. “That may be the most unorthodox bit of advice I’ve ever heard,” she said. “But it makes sense to me.”

“It does?” John heard his voice crack. “What about not being rushed, and needing time, and all the rest of the stuff your mother told me?”

She drew in a shaky breath and smiled. “John, you’ve been hanging in my closet for five years,” she said. “If you’re ready to come on out, so am I.”