Chapter 2 This Is Not a Rehearsal
THIS IS NOT A REHEARSAL
KELSEY
The last time Penelope and I had a real stretch of downtime on tour, we bingewatched the entire run of The Monarch, a FlixNChill drama about the British royal family that we had absolutely no business being as obsessed with as we were.
We watched the whole thing in hotel rooms and green rooms and the back of tour buses, sharing a single set of earbuds like a couple of college roommates, gasping at the same moments.
There was one scene I kept coming back to.
The young princess, the morning of her wedding.
Dressed, done, crown on. The whole world outside those palace windows waiting with bated breath.
And her face, just absolutely wrecked with the quiet knowledge that this was no longer her day.
It had grown so far past her that she couldn’t see the edges of it anymore.
She was going to walk out those doors and perform the biggest show of her life, and she couldn’t stop it, and she couldn’t want to, because stopping it would break too many things.
I understood her in a way I really hadn’t when I first watched it.
I turned from the window and its view of the Aspen streets below, already lined with fans even at this hour, and tried to locate something to do with my hands.
The thing was, I had absolutely no regrets about marrying Declan.
Zero. None. He was the most important person in my life and I couldn’t wait to spend the rest of it with him.
A year ago I didn’t even know his name and now the thought of him not being in my life was something I couldn’t even finish forming.
But this wedding.
From the second our engagement leaked, it had been nothing but a full frontal assault.
Publicity deals, brand sponsorships, magazines in a bidding war for exclusive rights, venues throwing themselves at us, and approximately eleven thousand stories printed about our most intimate moments that had been made up entirely from scratch by people who had never met either of us.
Somewhere between the save the dates and the seating chart, today had stopped being my wedding and started being a production.
The Wedding of Kelsey Best and Declan Kingman. Opening night. Sold out.
I was the girl who had performed on stages in front of a hundred thousand people and felt completely at home up there. I loved performing. I loved my fans. I had worked my whole life to get to exactly this level of visibility and I was grateful for every last bit of it.
But I was also, underneath all of that, just a girl who wanted to marry the man who had carried her off a stage in Aspen and sat with her all night in a hospital room holding her hand.
I wanted that guy. Not the show.
“Kelsey Best.” Penny’s voice came from somewhere behind me. “Get away from that window before somebody sees you.”
I turned and smiled at her.
My Lucky Penny. The second most important person in my life, which was saying something considering the competition.
I was so glad she’d come back to me after everything that had happened with Skeeter and Big Marine last year.
She was not only my right hand and my best friend, she was about to officially become my sister, since she and Everett had gotten engaged and she hadn’t let any of us forget it for a single day since.
She looked stunning. Her red hair was pinned up in an elaborate updo and she was wearing a satin robe with “Maid of Honor” embroidered across the back in the same script as my own “Bride.” We’d already been through hair and makeup, the teams set up in a separate suite at Penny’s insistence so we could have at least a few hours of quiet before the chaos.
I’d opted out of a veil and worn my hair in an elaborate crystal-decorated braid instead, a nod to how I’d worn it the day Declan and I first met.
It felt right. Like bringing the beginning with me to the happy ever after.
Penny and Jules, along with our wedding planner Ciara Mosely Willingham, had formed what they called the Legion of Groom.
A triumvirate of terrifying organizational energy that had handled every detail of this wedding with military precision.
I was grateful for all three of them. I was also overwhelmed in a way I couldn’t quite explain to any of them, because they had worked so hard and I loved them and I didn’t want to be ungrateful.
There was a part of me, a small but persistent part, that wished Declan and I had done what Willa and Hayes did. Just slipped away and come back already married.
But I couldn’t do that to my parents. I was their only child, and they deserved to be part of this day. Especially knowing that Declan didn’t have his mom here to celebrate with him.
“You look worried,” Penny said. She settled onto the end of the bed and looked at me with those sharp green eyes that had never once failed to see straight through me.
“I’m great. It’s my wedding day.”
“It would be okay if you weren’t entirely great, you know. This is a lot for anybody, and with you, everything gets turned up to about an eleven.”
“No, I’m fine.” I felt the slightest twinge of guilt for the lie. There was nothing anybody could do at this point anyway. “Just thinking about Mom and Dad handling all of this. Especially Mom. She doesn’t love crowds.”
“They are tougher than you give them credit for.” Penny stood and came over to straighten my robe tie, which didn’t need straightening, which meant she was just doing something with her hands too.
“They’re going to be here for lunch soon.
Then Rose comes to get you dressed. Then we go get you hitched. No big deal.”
I laughed, which was the intended effect. “Just another Tuesday.”
“Exactly.”
The quiet lunch had been Penny’s idea, and it was the thing I was most grateful for today.
A few minutes of normal before everything became very not normal.
My parents existed in a completely different world from the one I’d built for myself, and incorporating them into it was always a delicate, careful thing.
My mom, Meredith, had grown up on a Christmas tree farm and had never fully left it behind.
She’d built her whole adult life around the season she loved, and she and my dad Xavier had fallen into a beautiful, contained life together, the two of them wrapped up in each other and in their shop and in their routines.
They loved me fiercely. I had long since made peace with the fact that it was in their own way that the rest of the world would never really understand.
Declan knew this about me, somehow, even before I’d fully explained it. He understood what it was to love your family and still feel slightly outside of them. It was one of the first things we’d really talked about. One of the first real things, anyway.
The thought of him settled something in my chest.
He was the reason I was here. Not the show. Him.
A staff member knocked softly and came in to set up the lunch, pouring two mimosas without being asked, which I appreciated deeply.
“Come on, Penny girl.” I lifted my glass in her direction. “I don’t get married every day.”
“Not today.” She shook her head. “I need to keep my head on straight. Virgin mimosa for me.”
“That’s just orange juice.”
“Kelsey.”
“You can live a little. Just this once.”
“I really can’t.” Her voice had gone quiet in a way that made me stop and actually look at her. Her eyes were wide and a little desperate and she was doing the thing where she pressed her lips together when she was trying not to say something.
I put down my glass.
I thought back through the last few weeks. Rehearsal dinner last night, she’d had sparkling water. The engagement party. The venue walkthrough. I couldn’t remember seeing her drink at any of it.
“Penny,” I said slowly. “Are you pregnant?”
She closed her eyes.
“Yes,” she said. “But please do not tell anyone. Everett and I wanted to wait until after the wedding to announce it because we didn’t want to take anything away from your day, and we wanted to be a little further along first. He bet me twenty dollars I couldn’t keep it from you this long and I am going to be so angry if I have to tell him he was right.
” It all came out in one long breath, like she’d been holding it in for weeks.
Which she had.
“I won’t tell.” I grabbed her hand. “Sisters before misters. But Penny, I’m going to be an auntie?”
“In February.”
I felt my eyes fill up immediately and completely against my will.
“Do not,” Penny said.
“I’m just so—“
“Do not cry and ruin your makeup, Kelsey Noelle Best. Pull it together.”
“I’m so happy,” I managed.
“So am I, and your parents are going to be here any second, and nobody knows, so suck it up.” She squeezed my hand once and then released it and straightened her robe like nothing had happened.
There was a knock at the door.
“I’ve got this,” I said.
“You’ve got this. Suck it up.”
Penny opened the door and greeted my parents with the serene composure of a woman who had definitely not just detonated the best news in the history of forever on me thirty seconds ago.
“Xavier, Meredith, how are the Parents of the Bride holding up?”
Mom and Dad came in already dressed in their wedding finery, which meant I trusted them considerably more than I trusted myself around a lunch plate. I was a world-famous pop star who could not be put in a white dress within fifty feet of red sauce, and everyone who loved me knew it.
My mom looked beautiful. She’d worn her hair down, which she almost never did, soft waves around her face, and her dress was a silver that made her look like she’d stepped out of one of her own Christmas displays.
My dad had his hand at the small of her back the way he always did, like he was still making sure she was there.
“Oh sweetheart,” my mom said, and held my face in both hands the way she had when I was small. “You look so beautiful.”
“So do you, Mom.” I meant it completely.