The string lights came on at seven forty, a full twenty minutes before anyone needed them, because Harlan Pruitt had put them on a timer and Harlan Pruitt did not trust the sun.
Avery Lindqvist noticed because she was standing directly under the first strand when it buzzed awake, and because she had been holding an empty wine glass for eleven minutes and needed something to look at that wasn't the glass. The backyard glowed. Beyond the patio the rectangular pool lay perfectly still, a long sheet of blue going gold at the edges where the sunset hit it. On the drink table beside her, between two tall vases of white roses Paige had spent forty minutes arranging that morning, an orange beverage dispenser sweated in the heat. A hand-lettered card in front of it read HARLAN'S ORANGE-CARDAMOM LEMONADE — TRUST ME.
She did not trust him. She had never met him. She had come for the wine, which was at the other end of the table, and which required walking past a cluster of Ellis's physical therapy coworkers who were currently debating hamstrings.
Fran had abandoned her for the cheese.
"I'll be right back," Fran had said, which in Fran's language meant *I have seen a brie and I am a free woman.*
So Avery stood under the lights in her light blue flutter-sleeve midi dress, the one that made her feel like someone who went to garden parties, and practiced the face she would wear when the toasts began. Happy. Not weepy. Supportive. A face that said *I am thrilled my roommate of six years is marrying a man I have met four times,* and not *who is going to split the electric bill.*
Someone tapped her shoulder.
She turned, and the face she had practiced fell off her like a dropped plate.
He was wearing a cream short-sleeved button-down and beige linen trousers, and he looked exactly the way he'd looked in March, which was unfair, because she had spent three months remembering him as slightly worse. Tall. Calm. A mouth that seemed to be holding back a comment at all times. He had a glass of the orange lemonade in one hand and the air of a man who had walked over on purpose and was now reconsidering.
"Why are you here?" she said.
"My brother is engaged."
She looked at him. She looked across the lawn, where Ellis Mercer — tall, easy, laughing at something with his whole chest — had his arm around Paige's waist. She looked back.
The resemblance was not in the features. It was in the stillness. She'd noticed it in Ellis the first time Paige brought him home, the way he stood in a doorway as if waiting to be told which chair was his. She had not connected it to anything because there had been nothing to connect it to. Dorian had been *Dorian.* A friend of a friend. A first name and a reservation.
"Your brother," she said slowly, "is marrying my roommate?"
"Apparently," Dorian said, "our families have been plotting against us."
"We had one date."
"We did."
"You left halfway through."
"You left halfway through."