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I, we might not really be married? After all that?” After he almost stood me up at the altar?
    “Hey, maybe the four of us can go to city hall together.” Erin smiled. “Have a double wedding.” She waited a few seconds for me to react. “What?”
    “Nothing.” I struggled to maintain a poker face. “I’m just shocked, you know?”
    “Tell me about it.” Her wry, world-weary doctor routine kicked into overdrive. “You drop tens of thousands of dollars on a wedding, you’d think you could trust the officiant to do his job correctly. I mean, what is this, amateur hour?”
    I nodded dumbly, barely registering a word she said.
    “You’d think someone at the church would’ve caught this earlier, but no.” Erin was really getting fired up now. “I say we explore our legal options. We deserve compensation for our pain and suffering. David’s cousin is an attorney in Lexington; I’ll give her a call and ask if we have a case. A trio of brokenhearted brides; what jury’s gonna say no to that?” She finally stopped to catch her breath. “But it’ll be more sympathetic if all three of us band together. Do you know who the other bride was?”
    Stella’s voice quavered behind us. “Me.”

7
ERIN
    I still can’t believe this.” David reread the letter informing us that our newly minted marriage was a fraud, then glanced over at me with excitement. “Do you realize what this means?”
    “I should’ve put all that money toward my med school loans instead of buying the froufrou wedding dress?” I tipped back my kitchen chair and grabbed a spoon out of the drawer next to the dishwasher.
    “It means we have a chance to do it all over again!” My new husband (well, almost husband, according to the State of Massachusetts) looked thrilled about this prospect. He was definitely more optimistic and spontaneous than I (a good thing, considering that I was such a perfectionist control freak that my father joked they had to invent a new personality profilefor me—type A plus), but the wedding hoopla had been as stressful for him as it had been for me. Maybe more so—after all, Renée was his mother.
    “Honey.” I stirred my yogurt. “How could you want to do all that again? Do you not remember the migraines we got over the great fondant-versus-buttercream controversy?”
    “No, no, I mean let’s do it right this time. The way we wanted to do it. We can go to Hawaii, just the two of us, and get hitched in our bathing suits on the beach. No hysterical bridesmaids, no stuffy country club, and best of all, no Mom.”
    “But we just took our honeymoon in September!” I protested. “I can’t take another week off.”
    “Sure you can. What’s Dr. Lowell going to do? Fire you?”
    “He might, actually.”
    “Are you kidding? He loves having your Harvard Med diploma up on his office wall. Makes him feel smart by association. If he fires you, he won’t be able to go around namedropping his new partner’s Ivy League pedigree. I say we pack our bags and go. Two honeymoons in four months—let the good times roll.”
    I closed my eyes and conjured up a vision of pristine white beaches, golden sunlight, and lush green foliage. David and I, holding hands, repeating our vows as the surf crashed over the—
    Back to reality, Dr. Maye. “I’d love to, David, but we can’t. Ihave so many new patients, and flu season started early this year—”
    He dropped to one knee in the middle of the scuffed linoleum floor. “Erin, will you marry me?”
    “Already did.” I wriggled the fingers of my left hand at him.
    He threw out his arms as if about to burst into song. “Okay, then, will you marry me again?”
    The man didn’t have a pragmatic bone in his body.
    No wonder I loved him so much.
    He clapped one hand to his heart. “I’m not getting up till you say yes. Every time you try to make coffee or open the fridge, here I’ll be, right underfoot, getting gigantic bruises on my knees. So you might as well save us