I checked the vendor sheet again and approved it. The florist could stop the personal bouquets from being assembled but had already ordered most of the flowers. The baker had finished the wedding cake, and the cake would still be charged in full. A hotel block might be released without a penalty for guests who had not yet checked in, but those who had arrived would have to work directly with the hotel. The wedding planner was negotiating with the caterer and the venue about using prepared food rather than wasting it.
That was when I remembered Alex's face at the birthday dinner. It was a strange memory to arrive amid invoices, but perhaps my mind had been waiting for an opening. The following spring, one of Lauren's friends had posted photographs of another wedding, and Alex stood beside a woman in a pale blue dress, wearing a ring that wasn't visible in the older pictures. The post had been captioned with congratulations to "Alex and Nora." I had asked Lauren whether Alex was getting married, and she said he had been married for some time, but that the relationship wasn't happy.
The conversation had lasted no more than a minute. I remember asking why she hadn't mentioned it earlier, and she told me she didn't keep an inventory of her ex-boyfriend's personal life. Later, when Alex began appearing in her messages more frequently, she told me he and his wife had separated. I never met the wife and never asked how Lauren knew the details. It was one of those things that had seemed harmless when viewed alone and more troubling when joined to everything else.
I opened a search browser and typed Alex Nolan's name alongside Nora's. I wasn't trying to locate him or track Lauren; I had no interest in driving to somebody's hotel or creating a scene. I wanted to know whether the woman connected to him might be about to experience the same kind of humiliation I was experiencing. A public anniversary photograph appeared near the top of the results, posted less than a month earlier. Alex had his arm around Nora, both of them smiling in a restaurant, with a caption thanking her for another year together.
I sat very still. Maybe photographs could conceal problems; I had just learned that a cheerful public image said very little about a relationship's private condition. But the picture was recent, and there was no indication that they had separated. Another public post from the previous weekend showed a small dinner with friends, Nora introducing Alex as her husband. I could not treat social media as proof of a marriage's emotional condition, but I could no longer assume Lauren's account of his availability was reliable.
I opened Nora's public professional page. She was a nurse educator who occasionally wrote about burnout, night shifts, and the difficulty of balancing work with family life. I recognized her from the anniversary photograph. There was a contact button that led to a public social messaging account, and I stared at it for almost five minutes. Contacting her felt intrusive, and I imagined how I would feel if a stranger messaged me out of nowhere about my spouse.