Conrad found the house exactly as he’d left it the last time he’d been here before school started—salt-browned railings, the single adirondack chair weathered to the color of driftwood, the attic window thrown open to let the sea in. It smelled like lemon oil and sun-warmed cedar. He’d come to the house to quiet the static in his head, to think about anatomy and the next term, about the constant pressure of being the kid who was supposed to Know What To Do.

He had not expected to find her sitting at the kitchen table with a stack of bridal magazines spread out like a fan and an expression that made it obvious she had somewhere to be and nowhere she wanted to go.

She looked at him the way people look at things they love because they grew up in the back of their head—the look that had always been there the year they’d dated quietly, the look he had not been able to forget. There was a tightness around her mouth now, something like a bruise.

“Conrad,” she said, and for a beat it was just his name, flat and ordinary as a footstep. Then she leaned forward. She should have been surrounded: Laurel and Belly would have been co-conspirators in any crisis built around her. But tonight the house was their small republic—faded quilts, stacks of paperbacks, a kettle that whistled in the background—and Conrad was the only other conspirator.

“You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to,” he said, because the first rule of being Conrad was to be steady. She’d always liked that about him, even when they were teenagers and he’d been stilted and bright and full of a kind of philosophical anger that fueled his compassion. “But if you want help—planning, logistics—whatever—” He smiled and the hoodie bunched at his wrists. “I’ll do the tedious stuff.”

She blinked. Humorless, fragile laugh. “You’re good at tedious.” She took a magazine, traced a veil with two fingers like she could feel it. “My mom says she isn’t against the marriage—she just thinks—” The sentence stopped. The way she’d been raised by a father who paid attention with checks and a stepfather who fixed a leaky sink with his hands made the word “mom” carry an entire biography.

Conrad closed the distance between them without thinking, slid into the chair across from her. “Tell me what you want,” he said. “Not what they want. What you want.”