“No,” I said, taking a step out of their room.

“It’s not for blackmail!” he called after me unconvincingly.

“Leave me alone,” I said, backing out of the room before J.J. could find his phone and take a blackmail picture of me. I checked the bathroom, but Linnie wasn’t there, either. Though I did use the opportunity of having a mirror I could actually see into to finish getting ready. I went over the rollers quickly with my hair dryer, then took them out one by one and shook out my hair. I piled them carefully on the bathroom counter, giving silent thanks for Brooke. My curls were falling softly around my shoulders, and this, coupled with the makeup she’d put on me, made me feel like maybe I was ready for this wedding after all. I looked at my reflection, thinking how in just a few hours, Jesse would be seeing me, and for once, I’d be prepared to see him too.

I gave myself a last look in the mirror before I headed to Linnie’s room to see if she was there, but the room was dark and quiet. I was about to go, to try and see if maybe Linnie and the bridesmaids were all somewhere together, when I noticed a strip of light extending from the closet onto the floor.

I pulled open the closet door. My sister was sitting on the carpet, underneath the hanging racks of my clothes. She’d put on her wedding dress, and she looked absolutely beautiful.

“Hi,” I said, trying to fight down the lump in my throat as I looked at my sister on her wedding day.

“Don’t,” Linnie said, smiling up at me. “You’re going to get me started and we haven’t even done the rest of the pictures yet.”

I dropped my heels in the doorway and walked into the closet, sitting across from her after carefully smoothing my dress underneath me. “You look so pretty.”

Normally Linnie would have brushed off a compliment like this, or made a joke. But maybe you weren’t supposed to do that when you were a bride, or maybe she understood just how lovely she actually looked. Because she just smiled at me and inclined her head slightly. “Thank you.”

“What are you doing in here?” I leaned back against the wall, hanging clothes just inches from my head. I couldn’t help but flash back to all the times Linnie and I had sat here like this, legs extended, talking about everything and nothing, or laughing until my cheeks hurt. We were in our usual spots, though we’d never been quite this formally dressed before.

“I don’t know,” she said, leaning back against her own wall. “I just wanted a minute of quiet before everything got started.” She gave me a smile. “Your hair looks great.”

“Brooke.”

“Really?”

“Really. She did my makeup, too.”

“Well, thank god for that.”

I smiled at that, even as I wondered how long I should wait before telling her she was wanted downstairs and people were waiting for her. She looked so peaceful that I was hoping it could actually be a few minutes from now. “Oh—Siobhan can’t come,” I said, trying to just toss this off. “She got stuck in Michigan. I’ll pay you back whatever her meal would have cost.”

“It’s okay,” Linnie said. She leaned forward, looking at me closely. “What?”

I shook my head, not wanting to put this on her when she was getting married so soon. “It’s nothing.”

“It’s not nothing.”

I waved it off. “We kind of had a fight,” I said with a shrug, like this really didn’t matter to me at all. “But it’s not a big deal. I mean, I don’t really need her. I have you guys. And she’s leaving next year for school anyway, so . . .”

Linnie nodded, but in a way that I could somehow tell meant she wasn’t agreeing with me. She reached out and smoothed one of my curls down, then took a breath before speaking. “It can’t always be about us, Charlie,” she said, her voice a little tentative, like she was carefully choosing each word as she spoke it. “You have to have people outside the family too.”

“I do,” I said automatically, before wondering if this was actually true any longer.

Linnie gave me a look that clearly said she didn’t believe me. “What happened with Jesse?”

“Nothing,” I said, and gave her a quick recap of Mike getting drunk and ruining the mood. “But maybe tonight . . .” Even as I spoke the words, I could feel my heart start to beat faster at the thought of it—I would be seeing Jesse soon. Like, in a few hours.

“Well, have your fun. Just be careful,” she said, raising an eyebrow at me.

“Girls?” I heard my dad’s voice—from the sound of it, he was on the landing.

“Yeah?” we both called back in unison.

“Uh—there’s someone named Ralph downstairs who claims he’s here to marry Linnie.”

Linnie shot me an exasperated look, and I clapped my hand over my mouth, trying not to burst out laughing. “He’s going to marry her to Rodney,” I called. “He’s a judge.”

“Ah,” my dad said. “Well, that makes more sense. I was worried there was going to have to be a duel or something.”

“Do we need to go down?” Linnie called.

“Pretty soon,” my dad said, and his voice was getting fainter, like he’d already headed down the stairs. “Almost picture time!”

“So,” I said, looking across at her and feeling myself smile. “Should we get you married?”

Linnie looked around the closet, then took a breath and nodded. I held out my hand to her and she clasped it, and we pulled ourselves up to standing together, the way we’d been doing ever since I was little. “Yes,” she said, straightening out her train and giving my hand a squeeze. “Let’s do it.”

CHAPTER 21

Or, The Boy I’m Gonna Marry

* * *

IS EVERYONE HERE?” WILL ASKED as he walked past us all—the bridesmaids and groomsmen, all lined up in the kitchen in our proper order, with Linnie and my parents waiting at the end of the line, in the dining room. “Are we all ready?”

“Is this a rhetorical question?” J.J. asked, sounding not sarcastic, but genuinely interested. “Because I think we’ve been ready for, what, twenty minutes?”

Jenny W. nodded, and I saw Elizabeth roll her eyes. But the truth was, J.J. was right for once. We’d all been ushered into the kitchen so that we could walk across the lawn in formation to the back of the tent. It seemed that getting the bridal party in place was not such an easy thing when there was nowhere to stand hidden before processing down the aisle. Since we’d be visible the second we entered the tent, we weren’t going to do it until the wedding was actually a go. According to Will, there was nothing worse than the guests seeing a bride in her wedding dress before the event had begun.

But every time it looked like we were ready to go, another guest would come in late, and we’d go into our holding pattern all over again. I couldn’t help but think about Rodney, waiting up at the front of the tent with his parents, and hoped that someone had told him we were waiting because people kept showing up late, not because Linnie had changed her mind.

The last two hours had been a frenzied blur, as it seemed like time was speeding up the closer it got to the start of the wedding. The pictures had taken far longer than I would have ever imagined pictures could take, and by the end of it my cheeks hurt from smiling—but now they were done, which was the important thing. Linnie and Rodney had wanted to do them before the ceremony, as opposed to after (which really made the insistence that Rodney and Linnie not see each other before the wedding seem that much sillier). They figured that this way, there wouldn’t be a long pause while everyone waited for the bride and groom to get their pictures taken. It was a good idea in theory, even though J.J. kept pointing out that if either Linnie or Rodney changed their minds mid-ceremony and didn’t say “I do,” we’d be left with a lot of awkward photos.

As we’d gotten closer to the start time, Will and Bill had kicked into high gear, and it seemed like they were both in ten places at once as they ran around, both in their tuxes, communicating by walkie-talkie, looking more like they were in the midst of pulling off a heist than planning a wedding.