The Maid of Dishonor

Chapter 1: The Call

The thing about rock bottom is that it has surprisingly good cell reception.

Amy Fletcher was sitting cross-legged on her apartment floor, surrounded by fourteen variations of a logo for a kombucha startup called "Gut Feeling," when her phone buzzed against a pile of rejected sketches. The screen displayed a name she hadn't seen in months: Megan Halliwell.

Amy picked up on the third ring because picking up on the first would suggest she had nothing going on, and picking up on the second would suggest she'd been waiting. Three was the sweet spot. Three said, "I'm a busy professional who happens to have a free hand."

"Amy! Oh my God, Amy, I have the biggest news."

Megan's voice hadn't changed since college—still pitched at a frequency that could shatter champagne flutes and summon golden retrievers. Amy leaned back against her couch, which was the only piece of furniture in her studio apartment that wasn't doubling as a work surface.

"You finally killed your neighbor's parrot?"

"Better. Well, not better than avicide. Different. Amy, I'm engaged!"

The word landed like a small, glittering grenade. Amy's mouth formed a smile out of pure reflex, the way a knee jerks when tapped.

"Megan, that's amazing! Congratulations! Who's the lucky—"

"James Preston."

The smile froze. Not faded, not faltered—froze, like a screenshot of happiness captured one millisecond before catastrophe.

James Preston.

James Preston, who had dark eyes and a crooked bottom tooth and a habit of reading the last page of a novel first because he said he liked knowing where he was headed. James Preston, who had disappeared from Amy's life three years ago like a magic trick she hadn't volunteered for. James Preston, who she had loved with the stupid, reckless certainty of someone who had never been properly heartbroken before.

That James Preston.

"Amy? You there?"

"I'm here!" Amy's voice came out approximately two octaves higher than normal. She cleared her throat. "Sorry, I just—wow. James Preston. How did you two—"

"We reconnected about two years ago, through a mutual friend. You remember him from college, right? He was in that economics study group with the guys from Haddon Hall."

Amy remembered him from considerably more than an economics study group, but this did not seem like the moment to clarify.

"Vaguely," she said, which was like saying you vaguely remembered the sun.

"Anyway, that's not even the main reason I'm calling. Amy, I want you to be my maid of honor."

There it was. The second grenade, lobbed cheerfully into the crater left by the first.

Amy stared at the ceiling. A water stain in the corner had been slowly expanding for weeks, and she'd been telling herself it looked like a butterfly. It did not look like a butterfly. It looked like a water stain shaped like impending structural damage.

"Your maid of honor," Amy repeated.

"I know we haven't been as close these last few years, and that's totally my fault—I got so wrapped up in the new job and moving to Westbrook and everything. But you were my person in college, Amy. My ride-or-die. And I can't imagine anyone else standing next to me on the biggest day of my life."

Megan's voice had gone soft and sincere, which was infinitely worse than the shrieking. Amy could deflect shrieking. She could not deflect genuine human vulnerability.

Say no, said the rational part of Amy's brain. Say you're busy. Say you've joined a cult. Say you've developed a severe allergy to tulle.

"I would be honored," said Amy's mouth, which had apparently seceded from her brain and formed its own independent government.

"Really? Oh my God, Amy, you're going to be the best maid of honor ever. I already have a Pinterest board. Actually, I have seven Pinterest boards. I'll send you the links."

By the time Amy hung up, she had agreed to attend an engagement party the following Saturday, participate in a minimum of four dress fittings, coordinate a bachelorette party, and give a toast at the reception. She had also agreed, implicitly, to spend the next several months in close proximity to the man who had shattered her heart and then vanished like he'd entered witness protection.

She set the phone down on the floor and looked at the Gut Feeling logo options spread around her. The kombucha company's tagline was "Trust Your Instincts." Amy's instincts were currently screaming at a pitch only dogs could hear.

She picked up the phone again and called her younger sister, Tori, who answered with the sound of a blender in the background.

"What's wrong?" Tori said, because she had the emotional radar of a submarine.

"Megan Halliwell is marrying James Preston, and she asked me to be her maid of honor."

The blender stopped.

"I'm sorry," Tori said, "I think I just had a stroke. Can you repeat that?"

"Megan. Is marrying. James. And I said yes to being maid of honor."

"James, your James? The James who ghosted you so thoroughly I thought he might actually be dead?"

"He's not my James. He hasn't been my James for three years. And yes, that James."

"Amy."

"I know."

"Amy."

"I know."

"You're going to be the maid of honor at your ex-boyfriend's wedding. Your ex-boyfriend who is marrying your college roommate. Your college roommate who doesn't know you dated him."

Hearing it laid out like that was like watching someone diagram a car accident.

"Megan doesn't know," Amy confirmed. "We kept it quiet in college because it was just starting, and then after graduation we lost touch, and when James and I got back together three years ago, it was—it was private. Just ours. And then it was nothing, because he disappeared."

"And you never told Megan."

"Why would I? By the time it ended, Megan and I were barely in touch. It would have been weird to call her up and say, 'Hey, remember that guy from the study group? He just ripped my heart out through my ribcage. How's your Tuesday?'"

Tori was quiet for a moment. This was unusual. Tori was twenty-eight and worked as a personal trainer, and she approached conversation the way she approached deadlifts: with maximum force and minimal hesitation.

"You could tell her now," Tori said carefully. "Before the engagement party. Before it gets weird."

"It's already weird. And what would I say? 'Congratulations on your engagement, also I used to sleep with your fiancé'? That's not a conversation, that's a hand grenade."

"Better a hand grenade now than a nuclear bomb at the altar."

"Nobody is bombing anything. I'm going to be mature about this. I'm going to be supportive and gracious and totally, completely over it."

"Are you totally, completely over it?"

Amy looked at the water stain on her ceiling. It seemed to be expanding in real time, which was either a plumbing issue or a metaphor.

"Obviously," she said.

She was not obviously over it. She was not even in the same zip code as over it. But Amy Fletcher had built her entire adult life on the principle that if you acted like everything was fine long enough, reality would eventually catch up. It was a philosophy that had gotten her through a failed attempt at art school, two dead-end relationships before James, a freelance career that oscillated between feast and famine, and one very ill-advised attempt to cut her own bangs.

She could handle this.

Probably.

After hanging up with Tori, Amy opened her laptop and typed "how to be a good maid of honor" into the search bar. The results were aggressively cheerful. Websites with names like "Bridal Bliss" and "Knot Your Average Wedding" offered listicles with titles like "50 Ways to Be the Best MOH Ever!" and "Your Maid of Honor Checklist: From 'She Said Yes' to 'I Do.'"

None of them included a section on "What to Do When the Groom Is Your Ex Who Ghosted You and Your Entire Friendship With the Bride Is Built on an Omission So Large It Has Its Own Gravitational Field."

Amy closed the laptop.

She picked up a pencil and, out of habit, began sketching on the back of a rejected Gut Feeling logo. The drawing took shape without her fully deciding what it would be: a greeting card design, simple and clean, with a woman in a bridesmaid dress standing at the edge of a cliff. Inside, the text would read: "Congratulations on your engagement. I'll bring the champagne. And my emotional support medication."

She almost laughed. Almost.

The engagement party was in six days. She had six days to construct a version of herself that could stand in the same room as James Preston and not combust. Six days to build a smile so convincing it could pass a polygraph.

Amy Fletcher had always been good at design. She could design a logo, a website, a business card, a brand identity from scratch. Surely she could design a version of herself that looked like a woman who was totally, completely, unquestionably over it.

She picked up her phone and texted Megan: Can't wait for Saturday!! followed by three champagne emojis and a heart.

Then she went to her bathroom, looked at herself in the mirror, and practiced smiling until her face hurt.