The Kincaid orchard lunch happened once a year, and I had failed it before the soup went cold.
Alistair's fingers hooked the neckline of my cream blouse and tugged it straight.
Alistair: You had that crooked when you got out of the car. People behind us saw everything.
He said it softly, the way he corrected a crooked frame on a wall.
Alistair: Christ, Maris. Stand up straight and smile.
Alistair: My coat is in the car. Bring it around in twenty minutes.
His hand found my back and turned me toward the donors at the gate.
Alistair: Give them fifteen minutes of wedding talk. That is all they want from you.
He walked toward the conservatory without checking that I had said yes.
I stayed. I smiled and said next spring like a date I had memorized for a test.
My glass was empty and I did not look for a waiter, because a good guest never looks thirsty.
The judge's wife told me I was very lucky. Alistair could have married anyone, she said, and he chose me.
I thanked her, because that is what you do when someone hands you a compliment with a knife in it.
Fifteen minutes became forty, and I stopped hearing my own answers.
Somewhere between the wedding date and the seating plan, I became the centerpiece.
The sun moved over the orchard and found the back of my neck.
I had stood in one spot so long that my heels had made dents in the grass.
A glass of water appeared at my elbow, cold enough to fog the sides.
Rory Kincaid held it out with champagne in his other hand, as if this were nothing at all.
Rory: Drink that. You have been in the sun for an hour, and you are the color of the tablecloth.
He did not make a joke of it. He waited with the glass out, patient as weather.
I took it, because my throat was dry and because refusing felt louder than accepting.
The cold hit my palm and I realized how long it had been since anyone handed me anything.
Rory: Alistair can fetch his own coat. He has a valet and two working legs.
Maris: He asked me. It takes two minutes, and I am not fragile.
The words came out sharper than I meant. Shame does that to me. It sharpens.
Rory: I know you are not fragile. You are allowed to sit down anyway.
Nobody had said anything like that to me in a long time, and I did not have an answer ready.
I looked at him properly then, and my eyes caught on his rolled sleeves and the sun across his forearms.
His gray eyes were on my face, and they had been for a while. He was not scanning the crowd over my shoulder.
Rory: I will have someone bring the coat around. He will not hear it from me.
It was such a small kindness that it should not have landed the way it did.
I drank the water slowly. It was the first thing all afternoon that had been for me.
Rory Kincaid saw me. That should have felt like comfort, but it felt like the beginning of something with a price.