The Unwedding

The ‘White Lotus’ meets Agatha Christie in the adult fiction debut from #1 New York Times’s bestselling YA author Ally Condie

CHAPTER ONE

No one could believe it when Luke and Ellery Wainwright got divorced the summer before their oldest child’s senior year. Everyone was astonished by the speed with which it happened — they were still together, everything just fine at the neighborhood last-day-of-school party, their children running through the sprinklers or lounging bored on the grass along with all the other neighborhood kids. Ellery brought the strawberry rhubarb crumble she always did, warm and smelling of fruit and brown sugar. Luke hung out with the dads over by the barbecue and returned wayward basketballs to the teenagers playing on the Humphreys’ driveway. They ate together on a blanket with their children. Later, Kat Coburn said she was sure she saw Luke put his hand on the small of Ellery’s back when they were leaving.

No one had known they were putting on a good front. That Luke had already called the game, that Ellery was electric with grief and still hoping he would change his mind.

But by the fourth of July, Luke had moved out. By the middle of September everything had been finalized, and at the beginning of October Ellery was vacationing by herself on the trip they had planned for their twentieth anniversary.

“We’ll seat you out on the patio,” the hostess told her. “Please, follow me.”

Ellery did.

She felt like she had been besieged by beauty since she had touched down at the airport in Monterey a few hours earlier. The drive to Broken Point was breathtaking, astonishing Big Sur vistas around every turn, and the resort itself was also stunning. When she’d checked in at reception at the Main House, she’d been greeted by a staff member at a low midcentury desk flanked by a gorgeous gilded screen. Small fires snapped and flickered in stone pits throughout the property, a stunning sculpture made of glass, steel, and granite looming near the largest one. Globe lights hung above on strings, swaying slightly in the breeze.

The restaurant, called Wildrye, was located adjacent to the Main House, and an enormous blown glass chandelier graced its lobby. The tables on the patio were dressed in white linen cloths, ivory candles, and fresh flowers in tiny ceramic vases. A breeze from the sea came up tree-scented through the forest and the open windows. The full moon hung over the ocean in the distance, glimmering the waves. A glassed-in building clung to the edge of the cliff a few hundred yards up to Ellery’s left, shimmering with light and shadowed with the shapes of people moving around.

“That’s the art gallery,” the host said. She was a doe-eyed young woman with a nametag that read Brook. “It’s booked for a cocktail event for a wedding party tonight, but will be open to all guests tomorrow.”

Ellery knew all about the gallery and the other features at the resort. She was the one who had done the research, found the place, booked the trip.

She’d stumbled onto the website by accident the previous winter, via a 50 Places to Visit Before You Die article. (Since she’d turned forty, two years prior to that, she’d been reading a lot of those kinds of articles online: 100 Books to Read Before You Die, the Best 100 Songs of All Time, etc.)

The Resort at Broken Point, the website read, in a font that managed to be both subdued and emphatic. The automatic photo gallery scrolled unbidden through pictures showing stunning ocean vistas, sleek, low-slung modern buildings tucked discreetly among redwood trees, a woman enjoying a spa treatment with a row of smooth gray stones marching down her perfectly tanned back, delicious-looking meals arranged on creamy stoneware plates and decorated with flowers grown on site in the organic kitchen garden. There was a sauna and a spa, Pendleton blankets thrown over lounge chairs on the terrace, heated pools, piles of fluffy white towels, mist threading through greenery. There was an on-site art gallery, quiet trails winding through a cathedral-esque grove, a collection of fine art and sculptures scattered throughout the property, a full-sized Airstream trailer converted into a bar and nestled in the trees.

When Ellery had shown the website to Luke, he’d said “Let’s go for it.” He was standing behind her and kneading her shoulders precisely where they tended to tighten. She loved it when he did that. “Really?” she’d asked, because it was very, very expensive. “Of course,” he’d said. “You only celebrate your twentieth anniversary once.”

“You should still take the trip,” Luke said later in mediation when they were dividing things up. His tone was gentle, as if he were committing an act of profound generosity. “The deposit’s non-refundable. And you really wanted to go there.”

Didn’t you? she wanted to ask. Or were you pretending back when we booked it? Had you already decided you were done?

“Here we are.” Brook pulled out Ellery’s chair. “Your waiter will be with you shortly. Enjoy.” She gave Ellery a menu — cream colored paper, letter-press print. Moments later, a waiter in a cuffed white shirt stood at her table, listing the evening’s specials.

Ellery couldn’t concentrate. She felt the acute, sharp, sudden pain that had been scything through all the parts of her body that had hurt the most since Luke had moved out three months ago. For a moment, she knew exactly where her heart was in her chest within a precise millimeter or two, thudding as it was against the muscle and bone that kept it contained.

But, as her therapist kept telling her, the human body can’t live at that high a level of pain constantly. Whatever systems made it so that you kept on going — even as your life was a shatter of sharp-edged glass around you — kicked in eventually to make it so you didn’t actually die. And then you’d be back to the basic, chronic, ubiquitous pain, the one that never left, the one you were beginning to realize you might live with for the rest of your life.

Ellery glanced up. At the table to her left, what seemed to be a father and his college-age daughter were seated. There was something similar in their careful, heads-inclined attentiveness to what the restaurant host was saying. The father wore a button-up shirt with khaki pants. His daughter’s long wavy hair was twisted in a bun on top of her head, and she had a fresh-facedness about her, a cleanness to the line of her profile.

It seemed like everywhere Ellery looked, every life she saw, cut her to the quick. Everyone had a person. Everyone else’s lives were going so well.

It wasn’t that she wanted their lives.

She wanted her own life back.

Excerpted from THE UNWEDDING by permission of Grand Central. Download Buzz Books 2024 to read more of this title, as well as dozens of other excerpts of forthcoming books.