Annie is a university professor who never much believed in love until Mark, a surgeon she kept passing on the morning commute and then met properly at a support group for trauma survivors. Both of them are carrying something they haven’t said out loud. The wedding goes perfectly until she scans the pews and sees a man nobody invited. From there Gauntlett reels it backward: Mark’s first marriage coming apart over drinking and infertility, the mysterious friend his first wife made shortly before she vanished, and the question of whether Annie and Mark meeting was chance at all. Gauntlett is a London literary agent who wrote it in secret while representing other people’s books.
The Stranger at the Wedding