Chapter 20
Ani
More than three months without Raffi.
She missed him so much. At first she’d felt a hollowness she did not expect.
Drained of her excitement and drive. Because it wasn’t just the kiss, or the way he could level her with a single whisper, a single look.
It was him. His stupid, thoughtful questions.
His rough hands handling fragile things with impossible care.
The way he listened, really listened, like everything she said mattered.
And the worst part? She hadn’t expected to miss him this much. Hadn’t expected his absence to sit in her bones, making every second stretch on unbearably long.
At least, through all these feelings, there were momentary distractions. Brief and never quite enough, but distractions nonetheless.
She buried herself in work, because if she stopped moving, even for a second, the missing would catch up to her.
So she pressed on, throwing herself into wedding prep—work for other weddings plus the wedding, creating custom invitations, finalizing flowers, and working with vendors to create a lounge area and custom lighting, all remotely so that she wouldn’t run into Raffi.
Today was the day Kami wanted to see the construction progress. So Ani would have to go to ? and wonder how she could look Raffi in the face for the first time since that earth-shattering kiss. After telling him they couldn’t do that again.
She felt her decision was both prudent and stupid. It was smart to guard her heart, smart not to get involved with someone she had to work so closely with.
And absolutely idiotic to deny herself a person whose very presence made her want to burst with joy. Who wanted to be with her, too.
And today she’d see him. She decided she wouldn’t even think about it. Besides, Ani had been up to something else the last few weeks, and it had finally borne fruit this morning.
To distract herself from the wedding and Raffi, Ani had been doing some work to get answers about where that couple who stiffed her had landed.
A month ago, Ani made another fake Instagram account, this time pretending to be a real estate investing guru, and had bought a bunch of bot followers for pennies.
Knar and her husband had mentioned their interest in real estate investing many times, so this seemed like a more promising trap to set.
Ani committed all the way, publishing fifty posts, many of them regurgitation of the same information she’d discovered elsewhere on the internet.
Her catfish was ready. Dr. Sam Huntman, Your Real Estate Investing Guru.
Yesterday, Ani sent a friend request to Knar along with a professional-sounding DM.
And today? Today Knar had accepted her request. Ani bumped back against her kitchen table, staring wildly at her phone.
“Why are you smiling like a fiend?”
Sanan had come over early, about twenty minutes before they had to leave, which normally would have delighted Ani, getting to chill and pretend she wasn’t about to see the most gorgeous, sweetest man she’d ever met who she had rejected.
Ani snapped the phone to her chest.
Sanan continued, “I’d say it seems like you have a crush, except those eyes weren’t crush eyes; they were devious eyes.”
Sanan was…right on. Ani couldn’t tell her, though.
She didn’t want her assistant feeling sorry for her, or worse, offering her money or something like deferred payment for Sanan’s work.
Or resigning. Shit, she wouldn’t be surprised if Sanan resigned.
Ani wouldn’t want her boss to be an incompetent insolvent whose business was hanging by a thread.
Things were slightly less dire at the moment since she’d received Grace’s first payments for her wedding planning and project-management services.
She still had two more payments to go, according to the contract, but Ani could breathe a bit easier now.
“Long story,” Ani said. “But I do need to check out something. I’m so sorry, can you give me a second? You can eat all the manti in the fridge. I also made hummus last night. Pita’s on the bottom shelf.”
“You said all the manti, so I’m going to take you up on that,” Sanan said, already heading toward the refrigerator.
Ani ducked into her bedroom and scoured Knar’s Instagram page.
She saw a photo of her, that same sharp bob, and her husband, Giro, with his signature massive gold cross necklace—the scammers who indirectly got her into this Kami-Raffi mess.
If they had just paid her, Ani’s life would be so different.
Then a snap of fear stung her, thinking that she didn’t actually want to reverse taking on Kami’s wedding, meeting Raffi.
Sure, the wedding kept piling on new types of awkwardness, but there were plus sides, too.
Big plus sides. She’d shrugged off the dead weight of her lingering Kami feelings, and she’d kissed someone new for the first time in two years.
Not just any kiss.
An astronomical kiss. She wanted more, she did, but—there were too many “buts” about it. The one thing she knew was that she’d never take back meeting Raffi. So the Avedissians sticking her with fifty thousand dollars’ worth of debt was somehow not the worst thing in the world.
But they still were the worst. On to snooping.
Knar had posted recently, and—interesting—all of her photos included lush tropical backdrops and lots of rattan furniture.
Guess that was her style. Ani tried to find a coffee shop or a restaurant, anywhere that had been tagged.
Maybe if there was a place the Avedissians frequented, she’d have a chance of confronting them.
It only took inspecting five photos to find a tag.
It had been posted just two weeks ago, and it was a photo of Knar and a friend in front of a lavish spread, with similar outdoor greenery in the background as the other photos.
Ani clicked on the restaurant name. She had to zoom out to identify the city, and the map was loading, loading. And then she saw it.
Bali, Indonesia.
Bali? They had moved to Bali? Or were they just vacationing there?
Ani scoured the rest of the photos, and it seemed that immediately after the wedding they had absconded to Bali.
So maybe they hadn’t moved but they were on a very, very long vacation/hideout in Indonesia.
She couldn’t serve them in Bali, much less get there.
She didn’t have a casual thousand dollars to spend on a twenty-hour flight to have a public tiff.
Well. That was the end of that trail. Her stomach twisted, a tight, helpless rage coiling in her chest.
She wouldn’t be seeing that money anytime soon. Probably ever. A hard-earned lesson, sure. But hard-earned lessons didn’t pay her assistant. Didn’t keep her business afloat. Didn’t undo the hours she’d poured into their wedding.
She hated that there was going to be no justice here. No confrontation. No legal recourse. No cathartic, dramatic reckoning where she got to stand in front of them and demand what she was owed.
Just this. Just staring at their smug, sun-kissed faces through a phone screen, while everything she’d built dangled in uncertainty, its fate resting in the hands of her ex-girlfriend. Who she hoped like hell loved what she saw on-site today.
Ani slunk back into the kitchen to find Sanan polishing off the last of the manti, straight from the Tupperware.
“Okay, let’s head to the winery.”
“You got it,” Sanan said.
Time to see Raffi.
Ani stepped out onto the winery’s parking lot, once again nervous as hell. This time, as she and Sanan approached the walkway that had the rock moat, Ani noticed it was gone.
“They got rid of that plywood eyesore,” Sanan said.
“Yes…” Ani said, thinking that she hadn’t been on-site in way too long.
They rounded back toward the garden, and Ani held her breath, waiting for the moment she would see Raffi. Her heart pumped hard, and her vision fuzzed around the edges in anticipation.
Then she spotted him, standing in his paradise like a lost prince, casually suited as always, staring at the open valley.
He turned when he heard Ani and Sanan making their way into the yard, and Ani’s mouth burst into a huge smile.
She hadn’t meant it—the action was entirely involuntary—but the sight of him made her body sing.
His hands, his lips, so strong and soft at the same time.
The scent of him, cultivated and fresh. Why had she rejected him again?
Something about her fragile heart? Oh God, she saw why she had kept her distance. She was an absolute goner around him.
They approached Raffi, and Chris emerged from the other side of the garden, too.
“Hi, Raffi,” Ani said, catching his eyes, then looking down. “Chris, hi.” She smiled politely.
She wanted to hug Raffi but didn’t think she’d be able to let him go.
He looked at her for a long moment, a trace of a smile playing at his lips.
As she held his gaze, it felt like he was weighing something, turning it over in his mind, and every second he stared, Ani grew warmer and warmer.
She finally broke away and released a breath.
She glanced around, realizing she hadn’t scrutinized the work at all yet. “This is incredible. So much progress in so little time. Never seen anything like it.”
Raffi clapped Chris on the back. “Told you he was the best.”
Chris waved it off. “Yeah, yeah. I had the time so why not be on track to finish ahead of schedule?”
“I like that,” Sanan blurted out awkwardly. She blushed red.
Ani said quickly, “It’s true. You’ve made all of our jobs easier.”
Chris smiled. “I’m going to have to leave if you all keep complimenting me.”
Then heel clicks sounded from the side of the garden and Kami appeared, Grace-less but with Galia, her younger sister. That was a nice surprise.
“Hi, Galia,” Ani said with a wave.
“My first time here. Wow. This is totally amazing!” she replied, staring around her.