(Vanessa's POV)

Julian Sterling and I were together for four years.

Four years. The best years of my life, if I'm being honest. The kind of years you look back on and think, I didn't know how good I had it. After we broke up, I told myself I'd moved on. I told myself that every single day for five years, and every single day, some small thing would prove me wrong - a song, a coffee shop, the particular way afternoon light fell through a window. I'd feel the weight settle back onto my chest, that familiar pressure behind my eyes, and I'd have to remind myself to breathe.

I never thought I'd see him again.

Bradley's private dining room was already loud when I arrived - laughter, clinking glasses, the warm buzz of people who were comfortable with each other. I pushed open the door with a smile already arranged on my face, and my eyes went straight to him.

I don't know why I'm surprised. I always find him in a room. Some part of me has always found him.

He was sitting toward the far end of the table, head tilted slightly down, scrolling through his phone. White shirt, black trousers. The same straight shoulders, the same sharp jaw. He looked exactly like himself, which sounds like a stupid thing to say, but I'd half-convinced myself that memory had exaggerated him. It hadn't.

The noise in the room dropped away. My heartbeat went loud and wrong in my ears. For one completely irrational second, I saw the boy who used to wrap his arms around me and laugh into my hair, warm and careless and so full of light. That boy felt like yesterday.

It had been five years.

My fingers went cold. The burning started behind my eyes before I could stop it, and I turned around and walked back toward the door.

"Vanessa."

Bradley's voice. I stopped with my hand on the doorframe.

"You literally just got here. Where are you going?"

Half the table had turned to look at me. I could feel their eyes. Bradley was frowning, genuinely confused, leaning forward with his elbows on the table.

Only Julian hadn't moved. He was still looking at his phone.

I pressed my tongue to the roof of my mouth and tried to breathe. My chest felt like something was sitting on it. Running into an ex is awkward under any circumstances. Running into this ex, after the way things ended - ugly, irreversible, things said that couldn't be unsaid - was something else entirely.

"Sorry," I managed. "Thought I forgot something in my car."

"Stella's almost here," Bradley said. "Come on, sit down. Five minutes."

Stella. Right. That was why I was here.

Stella Hayes, my best friend since we were twelve years old, had met Bradley last month and married him approximately three weeks later, which was completely insane and also completely Stella. The wedding was set for mid-next-month. Tonight was supposed to be easy - both sides bringing their closest people, everyone getting acquainted, talking through the ceremony details over a nice dinner.

I had spent forty-five minutes in my car before coming in, giving myself the talk. You're a lawyer. You've cross-examined hostile witnesses. You've stood in front of judges who wanted to destroy you. You can sit at a dinner table for two hours.

I took a slow breath, let go of the doorframe, and walked inside.

I found an empty seat and sat down, and that was when I noticed the woman next to Julian.

Serena Montague. Of course.

She was exactly as I remembered - perfect makeup, platinum hair, the particular kind of beauty that knows exactly what it's doing. Julian's childhood friend. The woman who had looked at me like something unpleasant on the bottom of her shoe for the entire four years Julian and I were together.

She was looking at me that way now.

"Funny," she said, loud enough for the whole table. "I didn't realize just anyone could get invited as a bridesmaid."

The room went quiet. Bradley blinked. Someone set down a glass.

I felt it land, that specific humiliation of being publicly dismissed. My eyes moved to Julian without my permission.

He didn't look up. He was still on his phone, his expression completely flat, like he was somewhere else entirely. The line of his jaw was harder than I remembered. The warmth I used to know was gone, replaced by something cool and unreachable.

"Who exactly are you talking about?" a woman across the table asked Serena, her tone edged.

Serena smiled. "She knows."

And then everyone was looking at me.

I've been told I don't look like a lawyer. I have my mother's face - soft features, hazel eyes, the kind of expression that people read as gentle. I've never minded. It's useful in a courtroom, that underestimation. People tell you things when they think you're harmless.

I knew what Serena was doing. She was drawing blood on Julian's behalf, and some part of me - the part that still remembered exactly how I'd left things - thought she wasn't entirely wrong. Compared to him, compared to what he'd deserved, I had failed. Spectacularly.

So I said nothing.

Bradley stepped in, his voice strained. "Vanessa is Stella's best friend. She's been Stella's best friend since they were kids. I'd really appreciate it if we could all just-"

"I don't have a problem with anyone," Serena said pleasantly. "I don't even know this woman. Julian's the one with history here."

Bradley turned to Julian with the expression of a man who deeply regretted organizing this dinner. "Julian, do you - I mean, do you two know each other?"

The table went very still.

I pressed my hands flat against my thighs, fingers gripping the fabric of my dress. The seconds stretched. I had argued in front of appellate courts. I had deposed witnesses who lied to my face and kept my voice steady. But those few seconds, waiting for him to speak, were the most suspended I had ever felt.

Julian set his phone down. He lifted his eyes slowly, and they found me across the table - blue and cold and absolutely unreadable, like looking at a winter sky and finding nothing behind it.

"No," he said. "I don't know her."

Two words. Quiet, unhurried, delivered with perfect indifference.

It felt like a fist closing around my heart and squeezing.

I looked down immediately. I pressed my molars together and stared at the tablecloth and told myself, very firmly, that I was not going to cry at Bradley's pre-wedding dinner. I was not going to do that.

The burning behind my eyes disagreed.

Bradley rescued the moment the only way he knew how - by producing a wine bottle from somewhere and announcing that we were playing spin the bottle, truth or dare style, to break the ice. There was a groan, some laughter, a general shuffling as the bottle was placed in the center of the table.

I was grateful for the noise.

Bradley gave the bottle a hard spin. I watched it turn without really seeing it, my hands folded in my lap, still working on breathing normally.

The bottle slowed. Stopped.

It was pointing at Julian.

Of course it was. Half the women at this table had probably been quietly willing it to land on him. Someone let out an excited sound. Someone else said, "Truth or dare?"

Julian glanced at the bottle, then at the table. His expression didn't change. "Dare."

Bradley unfolded a slip of paper from a bowl I hadn't noticed before, read it, and looked faintly alarmed. Then he read it aloud: "Kiss a lady at the table through a napkin. Two minutes."

A beat of silence. Then noise.

Julian's brow pulled together slightly. That was the only reaction - a small crease between his brows, there and gone.

I turned my hands over in my lap and pressed my knuckles together, hard. The ache in my chest was doing something complicated and stupid, and I hated it.

Serena was already laughing. She pulled a napkin from the table with a bright, certain smile, the smile of someone who has never once doubted her place in a room. She held it to her lips, turned toward Julian, and leaned in.