Plus One to the Disaster

"e;I need a professional date for my ex-girlfriend's wedding. No feelings. No complications. Just someone credible enough to prove I've moved on."e;Dani Reyes has spent three years telling everyone -- her mother, her best friend, her bathroom mirror -- that she is completely, entirely, absolutely over Camille. So when the cream-colored invitation arrives on her kitchen counter with its impeccable typeface and its pointed plus-one line, she does the only logical thing: she hires a professional social escort named Soleil Marchand to play the part of devoted girlfriend for one chaotic wedding weekend at a countryside estate in upstate New York.Soleil is everything the job description promised. Composed. Credible. Quietly unnerving in the way of someone who has never needed a room to know she arrived. She asks three clarifying questions, signs the contract, and shows up to the car on time. She is, in every professional sense, exactly what Dani paid for.What Dani did not pay for: the discovery, forty-five minutes into the drive, that Soleil is Camille's other ex-girlfriend. Or the rehearsal dinner, where their carefully constructed cover story begins developing hairline cracks in exactly the wrong places. Or the hotel bar at midnight, where they stop performing for everyone else and accidentally start being honest with each other -- possibly for the first time in either of their lives.Camille's wedding weekend was supposed to be a survival mission. A performance. A chance for Dani to prove, once and for all, that the woman who upended her early thirties is just a chapter she finished. But somewhere between the ceremony and the champagne hour and a conversation at 2 a.m. in the bridal suite, Dani has to confront the thing she has been most carefully avoiding: not the loss of Camille, but the story she built around that loss -- and what it means that the woman beside her is the only person who refuses to let her stay inside it.Sometimes the most inconvenient person to fall for is the one who already knows your whole performance and finds the real you more interesting.