Most Likely To

Chapter 1: I. The Invitation

The invitation arrived in Halifax on a wet Tuesday in September, in a pale blue envelope with a school crest on the flap, and Nadia Haddad stood in the lobby of her apartment building and read it twice before she understood what she was holding. Port Alder Secondary School. Class of 2016. TEN YEARS LATER! Join us on Saturday, November 7th, in the gymnasium, for an evening of dinner, dancing, and the long-awaited opening of the Class Time Capsule. Please bring your yearbook and a sense of humor. Below the printed text, in blue ballpoint, in a scrawl she would have known anywhere, her mother had added: You are going. I have already told Mrs. Delacroix. Love, Mama. Nadia laughed out loud in the empty lobby, and then stopped, because there was something at the bottom of the invitation she hadn't noticed. It was a list of confirmed guests, printed in tiny type, alphabetical, running down the back of the card like a roll of the dead. She found the name in under four seconds. Briggs, Owen. She folded the card in half. She put it in her bag. She rode the elevator to the fourth floor with her pulse going in her ears like a drum, and told herself it did not matter. It was ten years. She was twenty-eight. She was a marine biologist with a doctorate, a research post at a good institute, and a rented apartment with a view of the harbor. She had stood on the deck of a ship off the coast of Newfoundland in a blue, windless dawn and watched a whale the size of a bus surface fifty meters from her feet. She had made a life. She would go to the reunion, and she would smile, and she would drink one glass of wine, and she would be perfectly, serenely, devastatingly fine. She booked the flight that night.