One Night With His Ex. Katherine Garbera

and shook it. “No. I thought he was here with you.”

      “No. He texted me earlier to say he was busy,” Helena said. “Do you think he’s having an affair?”

      Mo put his arm around her shoulders. “I can’t believe he would do that. He loves you and whatever this is, it’s not that.”

      It was somehow easier to talk to Mauricio than her sister because she knew that he wouldn’t talk to anyone in her family about what was going on.

      “She’s taken,” Hadley said, coming up and putting a large glass of water in front of Helena.

      “I’m trying to reassure your sister that I’m not going to screw up things for her wedding,” Mauricio said.

      She didn’t know what had happened, but it was obvious to Helena that there was still a spark between these two, no matter how hard they tried to move on from each other. Thinking that she was casting a pall over the evening with her Malcolm worries, she nudged Mo toward her sister. “You are going to have to dance together at the reception. Better practice.”

      Mauricio gave her a hard look, which surprised her. He seemed so easygoing when it came to her sister but it was clear that he wasn’t as cool as he pretended to be.

      “Sure. Why not?” Hadley said.

      Mauricio took Hadley’s hand and led her to the dance floor. She could handle herself despite what their mother thought. Helena sipped her water and turned her attention to her phone. She clicked on the friend finder app but didn’t see Malcolm’s icon. She was starting to worry that he was having second thoughts about getting married.

      She sighed and kept refreshing the app to try to make him appear, but he was still unavailable. Waiting had never really been one of her strong suits so she finally texted him.

      Where the hell are you?

      She saw that the message was delivered and kept staring at the screen as if that was going to make him respond to her. But nothing.

      What was going on with Malcolm? They’d always been on the same page with their relationship. She’d counted herself lucky that she’d fallen in love with a man who wanted the same things out of life that she did, but now she didn’t know if she’d been fooling herself.

      That’s what Hadley had said about Mauricio when they’d broken up last year, that she’d fooled herself into believing he was a different man than he really was. As Helena shoved her phone into her handbag and looked up at her sister, dancing way too close to the man she’d said she was over, she realized that they all did that. Hadley was just like her, fooling herself into believing she was in control of her emotions when in reality they were all prisoners to them.

      Her phone pinged and she scrambled to get it out of her purse. It was Malcolm. Finally! His phone had died and he was at home waiting for her.