The Edge of Us

The night I met him, the ocean took my sense of time. We were on a peninsula like a punctuation mark—white cliffs folding into a dark, patient sea—where my oldest friend was about to marry a man she'd chosen like a balm. The resort smelled of citrus and salt and the kind of expensive soap that leaves a subtle memory on your skin. Fairy lights hung like careful constellations above the dinner tables. Laughter came in waves, a soundtrack of clinking glasses and the warm cadence of family meeting friends. I had rehearsed my toast twice, tucked it into the leather pocket of my clutch, and told myself over and over that my role for the weekend was to be steady, luminous, indispensable: maid of honor, confidante, immovable island. I had not rehearsed the way his hand would find the back of my chair. He arrived like a late footnote to the evening—an extra guest who had been excused from the rehearsal schedule. Everyone called him Julian because Julian was what his mother had named him and because Julian sounded like someone with a passport and a sulking dog and a history of staying up for the sunrise. He moved as if he had breath enough for a hundred small observances: adjusting the napkin at the head table as if it were a painting, offering a joke to the woman two seats away, greeting the groom with a warmth that made the groom's eyes soften. He had the kind of calm that felt engineered rather than effortless, like someone who had learned how to hold still in the center of a storm. He was older than me by a hairline: thirty-nine, a documentary filmmaker who shot human stories in places where the map ran thin and animals and grief overlapped. At dinner he spoke quietly about projects and small betrayals—how a subject's truth sometimes arrives in the moment you're least willing to listen. He laughed with his eyes, a small tilt of the mouth that made him look dangerously present. There was a line of sun that had learned to live across his cheekbones; when he smiled it felt like a secret you weren't supposed to have. I noticed him because Lena, my bride, noticed him. She had told me, weeks before the wedding, between nervous bursts of lipstick and spreadsheets, that Julian was a friend of the groom's,