APRIL 2014
CHAPTER ONE
APRIL
April looked through the glass walls of the third-floor conference room, where her colleagues had been camped out all week negotiating deal terms, and tried—and failed—to refrain from picturing opposing counsel naked.
She hadn't been this horny on a daily basis since she was sixteen, and Bobby Coffey's heavy lidded stares during precalc foretold another lunchtime rendezvous in the park across from Taco Bell, his tongue urgent and slick with enchilada sauce, his hands daring to go ever farther under her clothes as her breath caught in her throat. She'd nearly gotten a C in math that semester, until her teacher's call home prompted a stinging lecture from Nancy about college and the importance of maintaining her GPA and using her goddamn brain. Her teenaged brain, while miraculous and expansive, could not compartmentalize as neatly as her thirty-six-year-old brain could, and so she'd had to give Bobby up before they went all the way.
Now that she was a responsible adult, though, a partner at Sullivan, Hawthorne, and Pollard and a married mother of two, she knew how to walk and chew gum at the same time. She could do her job at the Baltimore law firm where she'd worked her whole career, and she could navigate the unexpected pulses of heat and want that shot through her at the sight of her ex-lover just a few feet away. The past two weeks, with him so close by, had tested her focus, but she wouldn't let him derail her. She went down the hall to her office to get some distance. On the corner of her desk was a square envelope that she'd brought from home this morning. It was cream-colored with hand lettering, and April knew without checking the return address what it was: the invitation to her little sister's wedding. The engagement dinner was tonight in Philadelphia.
She steeled herself, then slid her fingertip along the envelope's seam and tugged out the card.
Ahmed and Maryam Monsour
request the honor of your presence at the marriage of their daughter
Hana and Juniper
daughter of Francis and Nancy Barber
Saturday, June 14, at 3 o'clock in the afternoon
Prospect House, Princeton University
Reception to follow
Juniper. So she was sticking with it, then. The name. A juniper was a tree or a berry, not a sister; an affectation she'd picked up at college the way April had picked up clove cigarettes. She was June on her birth certificate, Junie to her family, third in a line of four Barber siblings whose names tripped off the tongue like a song. April, May, June, July.
But it was their father's name on the next line that made April's heart capsize. The lovely, proper Christian name that called to mind a knobby-kneed British schoolboy in short pants and tall socks, not the stocky kid on the Chesapeake Bay. The curly swoosh capping the F like the beret on a Papal Swiss Guard. So much pomp and circumstance hoping and failing to obscure one man's absence.
He'd been gone nearly ten years, but no one had ever called their father Francis. He'd only ever been Frank—at work, at home and with his friends, in the headlines.
Every time the Barbers gathered without Frank felt wrong—each Christmas or birthday somehow off-key and out of tempo, until they'd just stopped insisting on them, letting holidays pass unremarked upon or finding new constellations of people to celebrate with—but a wedding? How? Maybe if Frank were dead, they could've found a way to honor him through it. Holding a thought for lost loved ones during the ceremony, maybe, or dancing to his favorite song at the reception. Or if he'd abandoned them all, they could've forgotten him, cut him out of their rituals without guilt or fear. But he wasn't dead or a deadbeat, he was just...gone. Missing, leaving a hole in their lives. And the anniversary of his disappearance was the week after the wedding.
Like it or not, the ceremony was barreling toward them. She'd have to get new dress shoes for her son, April thought, shoving her messy grief in the junk drawer, turning to the safety and momentum of a to-do list. And pants that were long enough. A new dress for her daughter.
April recalled the struggle to outfit her siblings for her own wedding, fourteen years ago. May, a legitimately terrible maid of honor, who'd shown up late and with no speech prepared, wearing Doc Martens under her dress; Junie, the awkward flower girl who hated the ruffly Gunne Sax dress their mom had picked out for her; July, fidgety in his first suit.
