The Best Man's Problem

Daniel made his living putting the right words in other men's mouths, which was, he often thought, the only profession in the world where being unloved was a competitive advantage.

He wrote wedding speeches. Best-man toasts, mostly — the panicked groomsmen who arrived at his door three days out with a head full of inside jokes and no idea how to say I love this idiot in front of a hundred relatives. Daniel said it for them. He was good at it. He could make a roomful of strangers cry about a man they'd never met, then have them laughing into their dessert before the tears dried. The trick, he'd learned, was that everyone's love story was the same story, told in a different kitchen. You just had to find the kitchen.

His own kitchen, lately, had one mug in the sink and a window that faced a brick wall. He preferred not to dwell on it.

The email came in on a Tuesday, from a name he didn't recognize at a wedding planner's firm he did. Toast required, reception of approx. 120, warm but brief, brides preference for humour over sentiment. Standard. He almost replied with his rate before he scrolled to the couple's names.

He read them twice. Then he stood up, walked to the window, looked at the brick wall as though it might have a comment, and came back.

The bride was Priya. His Priya — or the Priya who had been his, for three years and one apartment and a cat they'd had to find ahome for when it all came apart. And the groom, the man Daniel was being paid four hundred pounds to praise in front of a hundred and twenty people, was Marcus.

Cousin Marcus. The Marcus who, at seventeen, had shown up to Daniel's prom in a rented car and a better jacket and left with the girl Daniel had spent two months working up the nerve to ask. Daniel had eaten a vending-machine sandwich in the car park that night and decided, with the full tragic conviction of a teenager, that he would simply never recover. He had, mostly. He'd had a whole life since. He had a business built on other people's happiness.

And now the universe, which clearly kept a sense of humour in reserve for exactly these occasions, wanted him to write the words that would make Marcus look good on the best day of his life.

He should have said no. Any sane man would have said no.

He typed I'm afraid I'm fully booked that weekend and let the cursor blink at the end of it for a long time. Then he deleted it.

Because the thing was — and he hated that it was a thing — he wanted to know. Not get her back; he wasn't seventeen, and the cat was someone else's now. But he wanted to know what kind of speech a person could possibly write about those two, and whether he, of all the speechwriters in the world, was the only one who could do it without lying. He'd spent years finding the truth in strangers' kitchens. He'd never once had to find it in his own.

He wrote back: I'm available. I'll need to meet the couple.

The reply came in under a minute, and it wasn't from the firm. It was from Priya, who had clearly been cc'd and clearly recognized his name too, because it said, in its entirety:

Daniel. You absolute lunatic. Saturday, the café on Bell Street, 11. Bring a pen. I have notes.

He laughed out