I flew Tamara in from Boston to Palm Haven by way of Charlotte, which cost me four hundred and twenty-four dollars, then another hundred and seventy-six for a rental car and the three-and-a-half-hour drive. Six hundred dollars altogether. Cal was getting married, and I didn’t want to go stag to his wedding. Nobody I knew in Palm Haven could be talked into going, which left Tamara. She didn’t drive straight to my apartment. Instead, she stopped at a dive bar on Ocean Drive, and by the time I met her there she was four cocktails deep and trying to convince the bartender to sleep with me. He hadn’t met me yet. Tamara had shown him several pictures of me on her phone and assured me he was interested. By the time I arrived, she had nearly convinced me of it. Then I walked in, and he hardly looked at me.

He wore the usual bartender uniform: all black, faded jeans, T-shirt too tight across the chest. He was a tick on the skinny side, which I was fine with, and somehow I had never met him before or seen his face plastered across the hookup grid. Unless, of course, he was one of those headless-torso bros. When he finally spoke to me, it was only to take my drink order. Diet Coke. I hadn’t felt like drinking, and it was only eleven in the morning. Besides, I planned on spending most of the weekend getting obliterated at Cal’s wedding and whatever festivities had been constructed around it.

I knew Cal from college. He had been a gym rat then, before graduation and work conspired to take up enough of his time that he eventually let himself go. We both moved to Palm Haven the summer after college and lived together for about six months, until he met Wade. I liked Wade at first. He was fun, always up for something, but he turned into a territorial little bitch whenever Cal and I tried to make plans without him. I didn’t blame him. When Cal and I lived together, we had a habit of hooking up whenever our attempts to lure other men back to the apartment failed. Wade knew about our occasional little trysts because Cal had told him, and he sank his claws in accordingly.

Cal’s bachelor party incident almost led to the wedding being called off entirely. We had spent a weekend in Hilton Head, trading one Carolina beach town for another, under the assumption that a change of scenery somehow made bad decisions less recognizable. There were eight of us at the start. By Saturday night, the distinction between the men who had come with us and the men we had picked up along the way had become difficult to maintain. What had been advertised as a bachelor weekend turned into a three-day orgy with occasional breaks for food, sleep, and one regrettable afternoon on a rented pontoon boat. Nobody seemed particularly concerned at the time.

A week later, we all had gonorrhea. All of us. The diagnosis moved through the group by text message, one positive test after another, until there was no longer much point pretending Hilton Head had produced an isolated casualty. I called Cal as soon as I got my results. He already knew. Wade had it too. This presented a problem because Wade had not been in Hilton Head. Cal, apparently, had come home from his bachelor weekend, climbed into bed with his fiancé, and delivered a souvenir none of us had thought to bring back.

Wade packed a bag. For nearly forty-eight hours, the wedding was off. Then it was postponed. Then it was back on but only if Cal agreed to several conditions I was never given in full, although I gathered they involved fidelity, humiliation, and Wade retaining the right to mention Hilton Head during future arguments for the remainder of their natural lives. By the following week, the antibiotics had done their work, Wade had moved back in, and everyone resumed pretending the wedding had always been inevitable.

Tamara knew none of this when she agreed to come.