We told the hostess where we were going and found two stools next to each other.

The bartender walked over and placed a napkin in front of each of us. “What can I get for you?”

I looked to Stella.

“I’ll have a merlot, please.”

“Would you like to see the wine menu to select one?”

She shook her head. “House wine is fine.”

He looked to me. “And for you?”

“I’ll take a Coors Light.”

Once he walked away, I raised a brow at Stella. “No gin to sniff?”

She smiled. “Not tonight. I don’t think it’s a good idea to mix business with hard liquor.”

“You also don’t think it’s a good idea to mix business with dating. Yet you’re going to ask me out.”

She laughed. “Oh, am I?”

I’d spent the entire day watching her from a distance. The makeup people had painted her with much more than she normally wore, including a bright red lipstick that still hadn’t dulled after all these hours. I couldn’t take my eyes off her mouth.

I swallowed, staring at her lips. “Some rules were made to be bent.”

She let out a nervous laugh. “Are you a rule-bender, Hudson? I feel like you know so much about me, yet I don’t know too much about you.”

“What would you like to know?”

The bartender brought over our drinks, and Stella lifted her wine to her lips.

“I don’t know. You’re divorced. What happened there?”

I frowned. “This is supposed to be a celebration, not a funeral.”

She smiled. “That bad?”

“I gave her my grandmother’s ring when I proposed. A few days later, I came home and she had a different ring on. She’d sold the ring and bought one she’d liked better.”

Stella’s eyes widened. “Oh my.”

I sucked back my beer. “Serves me right since I married her anyway.”

“Why did you?”

That was a damn good question. People always asked why we broke up, but never why I’d married Lexi to begin with. “If you’d asked me that before the wedding, I would have said I was young and we had a lot in common—we both liked to travel, we ran in the same social circle…”

“But the answer isn’t the same now?”

I shook my head. “Hindsight is a lot clearer. My mother had died the year before. I was working in the family business, taking on more and more responsibilities because my father had taken a step back from things after his first heart attack. It felt like what should come next. That sounds really ignorant saying it out loud today, but my family was falling apart, and I think I just wanted what I’d had, so I went about making my own. I’d been with Lexi for a few years, so I took the next steps. Basically, I was an idiot.”

“I don’t think you were an idiot. I think it’s kind of sweet that you were trying to hold on to your family life. I take it your parents had a strong marriage?”

I nodded. “They did. Still held hands, and whenever one of them noticed the time was five thirteen on a clock, they wished each other a happy anniversary. They were married on May thirteenth.”

“Aww…that’s pretty romantic.”

“What about you? Parents still married?”

“They are. But they have an...interesting marriage…” She hesitated. “My parents are polyamorous.”

My brows jumped. “Wow. So your father is married to multiple people?”

She shook her head. “No, that’s polygamy. They just have an open relationship. Always have.”

“How does that work?”

“I grew up in a two-story house in Westchester. We had a small, two-bedroom apartment downstairs, and three bedrooms upstairs. On the main floor, life was normal. My sister and I each had our own room, and my parents shared a bedroom. But we always had a lot of my parents’ friends come to stay in the guest rooms downstairs. They never really hid their lifestyle from us, but it wasn’t until I was about eight or nine that I realized how different their relationship was. Our bathroom was getting redone on the main floor, and I’d woken up in the middle of the night. I needed to go, so I went downstairs. As I went toward the bathroom, a woman walked out in her underwear. I’d met her before, but I hadn’t expected to see anyone, so I screamed. My father came running out from the bedroom down the hall in his underwear. The next day, my parents sat my sister and me down and explained things.”

“That must have been difficult to grasp at that age.”

She nodded. “I definitely struggled with it for a while. None of my friends’ parents were like that, and neither were the couples on TV—especially not twenty years ago. So I didn’t understand why my parents had to be different. It made me wonder if that’s how my life would be. I remember asking my mom one day if what they had was hereditary.”

My eyes widened. “You don’t… You’re not…”

Stella chuckled. “Definitely not. I’ve accepted my parents’ marriage for what it is, but I knew early on that it wasn’t a lifestyle I wanted. I’m a pretty jealous person when it comes to my relationships. I’m way too territorial to share.”

I smiled, thinking about how I’d felt when Jack had brought Brent around. Hell, Stella and I weren’t even dating, and I’d wanted to punch the guy. “I get it.”

I remembered that she’d alluded to a bad relationship with her father the day she came to my office to pick up her cell. “Do they still live in Westchester?”

She nodded. “Same house. As far as I know, they have the same upstairs marital bedroom and the downstairs for their extracurricular activities. But I haven’t been there in over a year.” She sipped her wine. “We had a…falling out, I guess you could say. If you don’t mind, I don’t really want to talk about it. Today was such a great day, and I’m not ready to come down from the high of it all.”

“Yeah, of course.”

She sipped her wine. “How about your family? Do you have any siblings besides Olivia?”

I shook my head. “Just the one. Thank God. I couldn’t afford another wedding.”

“I’m sure having a wedding at the library must’ve cost a small fortune. One of the women whose diaries I read a while ago got married there, too. I fell in love with the way she described it. At the time I was reading it, I worked nearby, and I used to go sit outside on the library stairs for lunch every day and read a few pages. I always looked around and wondered if the man she’d married might be passing by, since they’d obviously lived local at one time.”

“You told me the diaries are your version of reality TV. But it sounds more like romantic fantasy than reality, if you ask me.”

“Actually,” she said. “That particular diary turned out to be more like a horror story. It was part of the reason I found out Aiden was cheating on me.”

“How so?”

“The diary had big gaps in time and spanned a few years. But after the over-the-moon wedding at the library, things apparently turned sour. She went from entries where she described the beautiful venue and her flowers, to entries where she described how she was covering up an affair. Some of the things she was doing hit home because I’d noticed the same changes in Aiden—like he’d started to work late and then shower as soon as he came home. The woman described how much she hated to wash the smell of her lover off, and she said she actually resented her husband because she had to shower right away when she came home after one of her dalliances. That led me to start asking Aiden questions. At first he made me think I was paranoid. He blamed the diaries I read for planting things in my head that didn’t exist. But more and more, things made me suspect something was going on. I’m actually pretty ashamed of how crazy I became at the end.”