I looked at the calendar. The sixty-day installment was forty-three hundred and twenty dollars. The second installment, due two weeks before the wedding, would be the remaining twenty-eight hundred and eighty.
I forwarded Jordan’s email to Claire with a single paragraph: “Jordan needs to hear from you before Friday. Please make a decision about the contract. The thirty-day transfer window closes in twelve days. After that, this can’t be unwound and I’ll have to make decisions under the terms of my original agreement.”
I sent the same email, slightly differently worded, to Owen.
Then I went back to work, because the platform migration was entering a critical phase and I had three stakeholders waiting on a status update.
Claire called me that afternoon. Not the following day, not after the weekend. Within a few hours of receiving Jordan’s forwarded email.
“I got your email,” she said.
“I know. How are you?”
A pause. “I’m scared. And I’m sorry. Not in that order.”
“Okay.”
“I have been trying to figure out how to call you for the past week and I keep not doing it because I don’t know how to start.”
“You just started,” I said.
She made a small sound that was almost a laugh. “Yeah. Okay.”
We were quiet for a second.
“I said something I shouldn’t have said,” she told me. “About not wanting you at the wedding. That was wrong and I’ve known it was wrong and I haven’t been able to say it directly until right now.”