Daniel called on a Thursday, three weeks after she'd stopped expecting it.
He showed up at her apartment — the one she technically still rented but never slept in — with flowers, a hangdog expression and the same cologne he'd worn for three years. He looked thinner. He looked sorry ,and also, Nadia realized with a jolt, like a stranger.
"I've been an i***t," he said. "Serena was a mistake. A stupid one. I want to try again. Let's do the wedding."
She let him inside and she didn't know why. Habit, maybe — the gravitational pull of three years, the comfort of a familiar disappointment.
He sat on her couch and talked about venue deposits and vendor contracts, and how they could reschedule for the spring, and how he'd changed, how he'd learned.
And Nadia stood in her own kitchen, holding
