"Kaelyn, I know you spent three months making this for me," Blake said, stepping forward with the charm box between two manicured fingers as if it were an offering and a coronation at once. His smile was slow, practiced—gold teeth flashing at the edge of his grin. "I thought you'd—" She watched him, and for the first time in a lifetime the sound his voice made did not lace itself around her heart. It scraped. Sharp. Foreign. Around them the Duffy garden hummed—white linen, champagne fizz, the low, dangerous murmur of family friends swapping investments like war stories. The gardeners had done a good job: espaliered roses, clipped hedges, lanterns that made the lawn look like scattered coins. Kaelyn had sat at the edge of it all for hours across two summers in the life before. Today the flowers smelled like wet sugar and failure. Blake held out the box. Camera phones slotted like beetles into the air. Someone from the Ludwigs laughed in the distance; the sound had the brittle quality of people who owed everything to someone else and were always worried it might be taken back. "Open it," he urged. Expectation wrapped his tone. He had rehearsed the look: hurt when she doesn't open, then forgiveness when she does. He had a script for love and an audience for pity. In every version Kaelyn had followed him across stages, across hospital rooms, across promises made on tipsy nights. In every version she had