FORGE TO A NEW DAWB
Chapter Eight: The Almost-Exposure
JJ was gone before Wren woke up, a note on the kitchen counter of the guest suite in his slanted, escaping handwriting that just said gone to prove myself to a man with a knife, back by nine, and she read it twice, sitting alone at the little table with her coffee going lukewarm, before she let herself smile at it, the whole apartment-turned-lake-house-suite quiet in a way that made the note feel like more company than it had any right to be.
The morning of the wedding itself unfolded in the specific chaos every wedding morning seemed to require, Marisol in curlers screaming happily down a hallway, Aunt Carol directing a small army of caterers and florists with the ferocity of a general, and Wren, dressed and ready far too early because waiting calmly was the only skill she actually trusted herself to have today, found a quiet corner of the porch to wait for JJ's return.
He came back at nine exactly, flour still dusted along one forearm, grinning in a way she hadn't seen from him even at his most unguarded, the whole morning apparently having gone better than either of them had dared to hope.
"He liked it," JJ said, before she'd even finished standing up. "He actually liked it. Said the technique needed work, obviously, everything needs work according to that man, but he took my application folder and said he'd read it this week. This week, Wren. Not someday. This week."
"That's incredible."
"It's because of you, some of it. You made me say the plan out loud to your dad, and hearing myself say it out loud like it was real instead of a maybe someday thing, I don't know, it made it feel more possible. I wanted to tell you before the ceremony even started."
She hugged him without thinking about whether anyone was watching, which was, she realized somewhere in the middle of it, the first time all weekend she'd reached for him without checking first whether it counted as performance, and he held on just as unguarded, burying his face for a second against her shoulder like the morning had cost him more nerve than he wanted to admit out loud.
The trouble started an hour later, during the lull before the ceremony, when Wren's phone buzzed with a text from an unknown number that turned out, once she opened it, to be from Devon.
Heads up, the text read. Marcus friend requested me on literally every platform this morning trying to dig up stuff on JJ. Found an old photo from like eight months ago at a work thing. Might want a heads up before he brings it up today.
Wren's stomach dropped. She clicked the photo Devon had forwarded, and there was JJ, unmistakably, at what looked like a staff holiday party, arm slung easily around a woman Wren had never seen before, both of them laughing at something outside the frame, the photo captioned, in someone else's handwriting from eight months ago, my favorite work husband.
It meant nothing, probably. It was almost certainly nothing, a coworker, a joke caption, exactly the kind of harmless photo everyone had scattered across their accounts from a decade of holiday parties. But it landed at exactly the wrong moment, an hour before a ceremony where her entire family was watching her prove she'd built a real, serious, two-month-old relationship, and the timing of it, the unknown woman, the easy affection in the photo, put a small, cold stone in Wren's stomach that she recognized, with some private horror, as something closer to actual jealousy than any fake relationship had any right to produce.
She found JJ by the drinks table, straightening his borrowed tie for the fifth time, and held up her phone without preamble.
"Who is this."
JJ looked at the screen, and for one unbearable second his face did something complicated, something that looked almost like guilt, before he answered. "That's Priya. She used to work the same catering gigs as me. We're friends."
"Work husband."
"It's an office joke, Wren, it doesn't mean anything, we haven't even worked together in six months."
"I'm not accusing you of anything," Wren said, too fast, in a voice that suggested she was, in fact, accusing him of something, even she could hear it. "I just, Marcus is going to bring this up, in front of my entire family, an hour before the ceremony, and I need to know what I'm supposed to say about it."
"You're supposed to say it's an old photo of a coworker and none of his business," JJ said, and there was an edge in his voice now too, something tired and a little raw. "Same as everything else this weekend that's technically none of anyone's business."
"Everything else this weekend is a lie we agreed to tell on purpose. This is different."
"Is it? Because it feels like the same thing to me. It feels like you needing me to have a clean, simple story with no loose threads in it, exactly the way you needed one for the leasing office, exactly the way you need everything, and I'm trying, Wren, I really am, but I'm also a person, with a whole life you didn't build a rule for."
The words landed harder than either of them seemed to expect, and Wren felt her face go hot, half anger, half something worse, something closer to being caught out for exactly the thing she was afraid of being, someone who needed people to fit neatly into folders instead of letting them be whatever complicated, unrehearsed thing they actually were.
"That's not fair," she said.
"Maybe not. I'm sorry. I don't have a rule for this either." JJ rubbed a hand over his face, and some of the fight went out of him as fast as it had arrived. "Look, whatever Marcus says, we'll handle it the way we've handled everything else. Together. That part's still true, rule or no rule."
But when Marcus did find them, twenty minutes later, phone already out, smug and pleased with himself in a way that made Wren's stomach turn, the two of them answered his questions a half beat too slow, a half tone too careful, the ease that had carried them through three days evaporating right when they needed it most, and across the lawn, close enough to notice, Wren saw her father watching them with the same flat, assessing look he'd worn the day they arrived, except now there was something else in it too, something that looked, unmistakably, like doubt.
Marcus, to his credit, didn't push it much further than a raised eyebrow and a comment about how it was funny, the things people didn't mention about their own boyfriends, before Marisol called everyone toward the aisle for the ceremony and the moment got swallowed by the general scramble for seats. But the damage had already been done in the half second of silence before either of them answered him, the half second where Wren's face had gone tight and JJ's easy charm had gone somewhere else entirely, and Wren spent the entire ceremony that followed barely watching her cousin get married at all, too busy replaying the fight by the drinks table, the word rule said like an accusation, the specific, awful accuracy of everything he'd said about folders and clean stories and people who didn't fit into either.
She glanced sideways at him twice during the vows, and both times found him already looking straight ahead, jaw tight, the borrowed tie sitting slightly crooked again despite the five times he'd fixed it, and both times she looked away first, because she didn't yet know what her face would do if their eyes actually met.
By the time the ceremony ended and the crowd rose for the recessional, clapping and cheering as Marisol and her new husband came back up the aisle glowing, Wren realized she and JJ had not touched once since the fight, no hand at the small of her back, no fingers laced together for the walk out, the first stretch of the whole weekend where the performance had simply, quietly, stopped, and nobody but the two of them seemed to have noticed yet.
Wren stood among the applauding crowd with her hands folded carefully in front of her, watching her cousin's new husband spin her once, twice, under the arch of flowers, and thought, with a dull, sinking clarity, that whatever came next, the reception, the first dance, the toasts, all of it was going to require the two of them to look, for one more evening, like the easiest thing in the world, right when it had never once in three days felt harder, and the reception, waiting just beyond the receiving line with its band and its toasts and its watching relatives, suddenly loomed like a test neither of them had studied for nearly as well as they'd thought.