But nope. Only her David Hockney screensaver stared back at her. Joey’s eyes blurred with the blues of the iconic swimming pool. So apparently Leo Winn was still coming to town. It was unbelievably surreal.

Mere minutes prior, Joey had been driving over to her grandmother’s condo along the highway that straddled the ocean, completely carefree, or as carefree as a bride can be twelve days before her wedding. Her phone had rung, identifying an unknown number. Joey never answered calls from unknown numbers—the introvert in her required time to prepare. But maybe it had been the wind whipping her hair, the contentment she’d felt. At thirty-four, life had finally slotted into place. She’d been happy, and apparently happy people answered unknown numbers. Joey had nearly swerved off A1A when she’d heard Leo’s unmistakable voice.

Leo, who’d broken up with Joey out of the blue the morning after their botched one-year anniversary dinner on Corfu. They hadn’t spoken to or seen each other in the fifteen years since. But now he’d heard about Joey’s wedding from his parents, and he was flying over from Europe with something important to tell her beforehand that, no, he couldn’t just say over the phone.

“You look beautiful, G. How was your birthday dinner with your friends?” Joey kissed G’s cheek—soft, with wrinkles in a swirl like a cyclone.

“Oh, it was nice, darling. I had the salmon. It was a little dry, but they did it with some nice mushrooms, and Doris had dolphin. Can you imagine? Dolphin, they’re serving now at the clubhouse.”

“That can’t be right. Dolphin’s an endangered species.”

“Do you think I’d make it up? Dolphin—right there on the plate.”

“Of course I don’t think you’d make it up. Dolphin! Who knew?”

The TV in the living room blared with an outburst from a Hallmark movie, the volume its usual senior-citizen high. Joey was struck by a melancholic image of G in her house all alone, watching other people get saccharine happy endings. And somehow that made Joey think of herself, in the months after Leo broke up with her, sitting on that sad brown couch in her off-campus apartment, watching Sex and the City reruns. Leo’s mom used to watch them on a loop in their Corfu apartment, and it had made Joey feel pathetically closer to him to adopt the habit.