The Sixth Wedding (28 Summers #1.5)(5)

Ursula told Fred she’d consider it, and she called her executive coach, Jeannie. After an hours-long conversation, Ursula and Jeannie reached some conclusions. Ursula didn’t want to be attorney general. She didn’t want to stay in politics at all; when her senatorial term was up, she would return to private life. She wanted to go back into mergers and acquisitions. She wanted to live in New York City.

She would do both, she decided.

After she hung up with Jeannie, she went to the kitchen where she found Jake walking in with a pizza from Barnaby’s.

“We have to talk,” she said.



Jeannie and I decided…

…you and Jeannie decided? You didn’t bother to ask me what I thought? Because I don’t matter, because you have no consideration for me or for this so-called family. Bess and I have always bent to your will and now your will is to be an attorney in New York and you think I’m just going to…what? Pick up and move my life there? I’m not, Ursula. I’m staying here.

Ursula had laughed. I’m not staying here one day longer than I have to. South Bend is the last place I want to end up.

Jake stared at her. I should have stood up to you long ago. Do you know why I didn’t? Because I have always believed that you were special. But I’m not giving in on this. If you go to New York, Ursula, you go alone.

It was an ultimatum, but was he serious? Was Ursula serious? They let the topic drop; Ursula still had a year of her term left so going anywhere was a moot point. Maybe Ursula was suffering from PTSD. Maybe she would change her mind and decide that it would be nice to stay in the Bend with her mother and Jake’s parents nearby. Or…maybe Ursula and Jake would finally get divorced. While they were dating, they had broken up a handful of times and seen other people but they had always gravitated back to each other. In the late nineties, Ursula had had an affair with her associate, Anders Jorgensen. Jake had conducted a one-weekend-a-year affair with a woman named Mallory Blessing for the entirety of their marriage. They had survived all that; surely, they would survive Ursula’s presidential loss.



Now, it’s four years later. Fred Page will sail easily into a second term and Ursula is the managing partner at Hamilton, Laverty & Smythe, the biggest M&A firm in the country. She bought a two-bedroom apartment on the seventy-eighth floor of 436 Park, which is the premier address in Midtown, maybe in all of New York. Ursula lost the presidency and lost her husband—but she’s gained a city. She loves the noise, the taxis, the subway, the sushi restaurants that deliver twenty-four hours, the elegant hotel bars, the doormen, the bodegas with their rainbow of floral bouquets out front. She loves the Cuban coffee place and the Vietnamese food truck. She loves racing down to Soho when she needs something new to wear, she loves the FDNY, she loves the guys who drive the horse carriages in Central Park, she loves the Upper East Side mommies and nannies, she loves the ten-story screens in Times Square and the tugboats on the East River. She loves that while everyone knows who she is, nobody cares, because this city is also home to Alicia Keys, Yoko Ono, Sarah Jessica Parker, people far more exciting than Ursula.

Does she wish she had someone to share it with?

Yes, she does.

Maybe a dating app, then, after all?

Ursula laughs at herself, and calls Jake.

She’s fully prepared to hear about his fun-filled weekend: sailing on Lake Michigan, meeting his parents for dinner at the South Haven Yacht Club, picking cherries, brunching in Saugatuck. At some point she’s sure Jake will start dating. Ursula will pretend to be supportive and he’ll know she’s pretending.

When he answers, he says, “You’re never going to believe who just called me.”

“Who.”

“Cooper Blessing,” Jake says. “He has the craziest idea.”



Cooper Blessing is hosting a bachelor weekend on Nantucket over Labor Day.

“Please tell me he’s not getting married again,” Ursula says. “What will that make it? Seven? Eight?”

“Six,” Jake says. “And no, he’s not getting married. It’s the opposite. He proposed to this girl named Stacey who was at Goucher when we were at Hopkins. She said no and now, as part of the work he’s doing with his new therapist, he wants to recreate the bachelor weekend—only make it all about the guys. Coop is single, Frazier Dooley is single…”

Yes, Ursula read about Frazier and Anna Dooley’s divorce in People. Anna walked with 280 million dollars—and Ursula had thought fleetingly, the way one does, about dating Frazier Dooley.

“And you’re single,” Ursula says.

“I shouldn’t say it’s ‘all about the guys,’ because Leland Gladstone is coming too,” Jake says. “She was with us the first year.”

“Wow,” Ursula says. “That’s going to be a veritable Who’s Who.” Leland Gladstone is the founder of the huge women’s lifestyle blog Leland’s Letter and was recently chosen as one of Time magazine’s Most Influential People of the Year.

Leland had been plenty influential in Ursula’s life. She wrote an article in Leland’s Letter entitled Same Time Next Year: Can It Save Modern Marriage?, which had been Ursula’s first hint about Jake and Mallory.

“Won’t it be difficult for you?” Ursula asks. “Going back to…”