It took all of Shep's willpower not to drink himself into a haze as they crawled from bar to bar, but the only thing worse than suffering through the stag sober would be getting too drunk to drive himself home at midnight and having no other choice but to sleep it off in Brooklyn with the boys. Nobody else had to worry about moderation, so before long he found himself being swept along in a tide of tottering debauchery, like a black-and-white mime mistakenly dropped into a Technicolor music number. The only upside was that Kyle and the others were too wound up to notice, granting him leave to nurse a light beer in the corner and brood about Claire.

He couldn't help it—his first reaction had been to her solidity, the shock of her being in front of him, real, breathing. His mind catalogued all the differences between the current model and the version he had kept filed away for seven years: shorter hair, tanner skin, marginally less baby fat about the cheeks and jawline. The eyes were the same hazel. The lips were still thin and delicate.

Yet, even from those few seconds they had stared at each other across the pool, Shep could tell she was changed; perhaps it was her stance, or a deliberate quality to her movements. When she'd said his name, she hadn't sounded nervous, but Shep could still sense it, like a metallic aftertaste. That was the key change: before, he had known nothing of what rolled beneath the surface—willfully or not—but now he could see the shadow of it. How could he have missed something so immense?

Kyle tripped over the plastic ball and chain Anthony had clipped around his ankle, flubbing a dart. It fell short of the board and embedded itself in a nearby woman's handbag. Shep watched as Matt, one of the groomsmen, leaned in close and offered to buy her a drink to make up for it; she threw her vodka soda in his face.

"Onward!" Anthony hollered, eyeing the disgruntled bartender and steering Kyle toward the exit by the shoulders.