Page 76 of My Best French Wedding

“Fee’s the one you need to talk to. Not right now,” he added, when Hildy took a step in that direction. “She needs time to heal from having her dreams stomped on.”

“Corinne’s going to kill me,” Hildy groaned, after Robbie rejoined his fiancée. “I’mgoing to kill me.” There was a slight pause, during which he sensed her gaze sliding his way. “You’ll have to take a number.”

“I don’t want to kill you, Hildy.”

She grunted at that. “Doesn’t really matter, since I’ll probably murder you first, before I off myself.”

“So this is my fault?”

“No. This is on me, because I was stupid enough to let my guard down. Even though Iknowit’s always going to end like this.”

It was a bit of a stretch to claim she could have predicted this exact scenario, but Walter knew better than to push back.

“I can’t believe I lost my shitagain.” It sounded like she was talking to herself. “How many times can I make the same mistake before I get a clue? But that’s it. I’m really done. No more screwing around.”

“Hildy—”

“Don’t,” she warned, cutting him off. “You can’t change the past. There’s no point pretending anymore.”

They were the last words she spoke to him for the rest of the long, chilly trip back to the surface.

25Hildy

SEVEN YEARS AGO

SAN DIEGO, Calif.—There should really be a licensing process before people were allowed to give advice.Go to the Associated Collegiate Press conference, Hildy’s professor had insisted at their last meeting.It’s a good time. And you might learn something.

Ha!

Halfway through the first day of panels and workshops, Hildy’s main takeaway was that the journalism world was suffocatingly small. Or maybe the real lesson was that the past always came back to bite you in the ass at the worst possible moment.

Exhibit A: The session Hildy was most excited about—Making Tracks: Finding Your Footing in the New Media Landscape—turned out to be a total bust. So much for attaining desperately needed clarity about her future in the industry. It was hard to apply strategies you hadn’t heard because you were forced to flee thirty seconds into the introductory remarks when your sworn enemy walked into the room.

In hindsight, Hildy realized she should have brazened it out. If anyone was going to turn tail and run, it ought to have been Walter. But Hildy’s brain had gone AWOL, leaving her central nervous system to hit the panic button. Her body reacted as if hispresence was a lethal poison: churning gut, skin blazing hot and then clammy, a suspicious heaviness in her bladder.

Hildy had just enough presence of mind to fake a phone call. It didn’t matter how much she wanted to look at Walter to see if he’d changed in the last two years. Aside from the bombshell of a first glimpse, Hildy couldn’t risk acknowledging his presence. They weren’t supposed to meet again until she had a plan—and a comprehensive makeover. Ideally there would also be a ridiculously hot love interest to follow her around making adoring remarks.See, Walter? Some people aren’t desperate to get away from me.

Instead she was having a bad hair day, her complexion was a wreck, and everyone she knew from school had chosen other morning sessions, leaving Hildy looking like a rejected loser.

Maybe he didn’t see me. It was a big space, and there had been rows and rows of full seats between them, not to mention Hildy’s cat burglar–style half crouch on the way out.

She hightailed it to the nearest restroom. Her stomach was still complaining, a dull throbbing ache that seemed to be spreading through her lower body. And now a sharper twinge that reminded her of… oh no. Hildy latched the stall door, staring in dismay at her formerly pristine underwear. Just to make the day a little more awesome, her period was early.

“Shit fucking fuckers,” she muttered, checking her purse and coming up empty. A vague memory of using her last emergency pad surfaced, followed by the mental note she’d made (and promptly forgotten) to replenish her supply. Time to swaddle herself in cheap toilet paper.

A hand reached under the wall from the adjacent stall with a wrapped pad between two fingers, the way a cocky guy might flash a twenty-dollar bill at the valet stand in a restaurant.

“Thanks,” Hildy said. “You just saved my favorite pair of pants.”

The door next to hers opened. Hildy finished her business quickly so she could thank her savior face-to-face. She was standing at the sinks, so Hildy saw the back of her head first: stick-straight blond hair in one of those cool ultrashort bobs that would have looked ridiculous on someone with curls.

When Hildy got closer, their eyes met in the mirror.I know you, Hildy thought, even though the face wasn’t quite right. Maybe Hildy had met this girl’s sister, or she looked a little like someone on TV, or… they’d been roommates two summers ago at a journalism program for high school students.

Only back then, this girl—Corinne—had been in her goth phase, making her hard to recognize without the black hair dye and intense eye makeup. High school Corinne’s most notable personality trait was meanness, so Hildy wouldn’t have known her by the heroic restroom assist either.

So much for the day taking an upswing. This had to be a cosmic joke.

“Wow,” Hildy said, skipping past thedo I know you?song and dance. There were only so many people she could pretend not to recognize in one morning. Besides, it was evident from Corinne’s expression that the jig was up.