Prologue

Reporter’s Notepad:

December 31, 2007

Help!! I’m being held hostage at a black-tie wedding on New Year’s Eve. Well, not so much a hostage as an indentured servant for a Pulitzer Prize-–winning newspaper that cannot be named.

Fifty-seven minutes and counting, and the ceremony hasn’t even started. The chamber quartet is playing “Endless Love” for the third time. Shoot me now.

I’m scribbling in my pad and trying to forget I’m a thirty-seven-year-old single guy alone on New Year’s. No, not alone. Surrounded by married couples. The only single woman is the bride’s grandmother, who is eighty-five and a humpback. And even she has a date.

I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to be writing about a wedding at the Angel Orensanz Foundation for the Arts, a nineteenth-century former synagogue on the Lower East Side, where uptown brides look for downtown panache. I want to be with Jill. I want to be kissing the back of her neck and wrapping my arms around her as we sway to the gentle beat of samba music at the Blue Iguana.

A bridesmaid is finally walking down the aisle. Slowly. I’ve never heard Pachelbel’s Canon played so slowly. A flower girl floats by on a cloud of white taffeta. All big eyes and brown ringlets.

I see the bride stand in the amber glow of candlelight, and something inside me surrenders. I can’t help thinking of all the brides that came before her, linked together by a white dress, a band of gold, and a first kiss. It’s a moment of transcendent hope.

And it makes me feel unbearably alone.

"Always a wedding columnist. Never a groom"

The New York Observer

Gavin Greene isn't only a hopeless romantic, he's a professional one: He writes the wedding column for a prize-winning newspaper, covering A-list parties from coast to coast. But there's a thin line between being a hotshot reporter on assignment...and being a single guy alone on a Saturday night.

Everything changes on New Year's when Gavin meets Melinda, a travel writer with an adventurous spirit. A moonlit walk across a Manhattan rooftop seems to seal the deal, but she slips away.

Gavin crisscrosses New York City to find her again. And he learns there's something worse than losing the woman of his dreams—having to write an article about her wedding.