Chapter Seven
Beth
There is a particular kind of love that goes into flowers for a wedding you are not invited to, and I have made my whole living on it.
People think it's pretty work. It is not pretty work.
It is four in the morning at the wholesaler with my hands going numb in the cooler, it is processing six hundred stems on a folding table while the coffee goes cold, it is wire and tape and floral foam under my fingernails for a week, it is hauling buckets up a ladder in a dress I'll sweat through before the first guest arrives.
But somewhere in the middle of all of it there's the thing I'd sell a kidney to keep doing—the moment an arch goes up, or an aisle fills in, and a space that was just a space becomes a place where something is going to happen to somebody, the best day of their life or close to it, and I built the part of it they'll remember in every photograph for fifty years.
I'm good at it. I'm the best in three counties and I know it, the way Alonzo knows his kitchen.
It's the one thing nobody's ever been able to take from me or make me doubt.
The Whitfield wedding was the biggest job I'd had all year, and it had very nearly killed me.
Brooke Whitfield was the kind of bride who changed her mind the way other people breathe—the palette three times, the centerpiece count twice, a Friday-night text moving the entire flower delivery up a day, which was the very thing that had kept me from the cake tasting.
By the morning of, I'd rebuilt half her order from scratch and slept maybe nine hours across three nights, and I did not care, because the Ashford estate that afternoon was going to be the prettiest thing this county had seen in a decade, and it was going to be mine.
And here is the piece that matters: Colibrí was catering it.
Which meant the Vargas family was there, all of them, in their black aprons setting up the long tables under the oaks—Rafael barking at the rental company, Diego unloading the van, Mari arranging glassware, Alonzo somewhere in the thick of it with his sleeves rolled up.
And it meant Lola was there, because Lola ran the events now, which meant Lola was the bride's day-of coordinator, the spider at the center of the whole web of timing—who set up when, who needed what, who talked to whom.
It meant that every single thing I knew about that afternoon, I knew because Lola had told me.
? ? ?
The timeline she'd given me on Tuesday said florals complete by 3:00, first look 4:00. I had it in writing. I'd built my entire brutal morning around it, every bucket and every break, racing a three o'clock finish with about ninety minutes to spare.
So at 2:25, when I was up the ladder at the ceremony arch with my mouth full of bobby pins and half the aisle still in buckets at my feet, and I heard Brooke Whitfield's voice climb into a register I've only ever heard at weddings and funerals, I genuinely did not understand what was happening.
"Where are the flowers?" She was in her robe, hair half-done, the photographer trailing behind her with his camera and a face like a man watching a building come down.
"First look is in five minutes. Five minutes.
The whole site is supposed to be done—it's in the timeline, I have a photographer on the clock and a—oh my God, the aisle isn't even—" Her voice cracked clean in half. "How are you not done?"
"First look's at four." I came down the ladder fast, heart already going. "Brooke, the timeline says four. I have it right here, I built my whole day around—"
"It says two-thirty." And there was Lola, materializing out of the catering tents at exactly the right moment, tablet in hand, her face a perfect painted mask of horror and sympathy.
"Beth. Oh, no. Oh, honey, did you—I sent the revised timeline Tuesday morning.
First look got moved to two-thirty weeks ago, the light, remember, we talked about the light—" She turned the tablet toward Brooke, not toward me, never toward me.
"I have it right here. I'm so sorry, I don't—I don't know how this got crossed. "
I have it right here. The four most useful words in the English language, when everyone in earshot has already decided whose hands are clean.
"I never got a revised timeline." My voice came out steady and it cost me everything to keep it there. "Lola. You sent me three o'clock. You sent it Tuesday and it said three o'clock, I can pull it up on my phone right now—"
"Beth." Just my name, gentle, grieved, like I was a child making a scene. "It's okay. It's okay, we'll figure it out. Let's just—let's not do this in front of Brooke, okay? She's having the worst day."
And that was the trap, sprung clean and perfect, because the only way to defend myself was to keep arguing in front of a sobbing bride, which would make me exactly the monster she was painting—the difficult florist, fighting with the poor coordinator, ruining a wedding.
Brooke was crying. The photographer was checking his watch.
Forty guests were drifting in across the lawn.
And every Vargas within thirty feet had stopped what they were doing to watch the flower girl come apart at the Ashford estate.
I shut my mouth. I helped them move the first look to four.
I did it because there was a bride crying and it was the only decent thing left to do, and Lola stood beside me through all of it with her hand on my back, murmuring it's okay, we'll fix it, don't worry, loud enough for everyone to hear what a good and gracious friend she was being to the woman who'd dropped the ball.
? ? ?
I found her behind the catering tents twenty minutes later, when the bride had been calmed and the guests were seated and there was a gap before the ceremony, and I made the mistake—the last clean mistake I'd make for a while—of thinking I could simply tell the truth to her face and have it matter.
"You gave me three o'clock." I kept my voice low.
The family was right there, fifteen feet off, breaking down boxes, but I kept it low.
"I don't know what game this is, but you sent me three, and you told Brooke two-thirty, and you set me up to take the fall for it in front of God and everyone. Why?"
And Lola's whole face crumpled.
"Why do you hate me so much?" It came out wet and shaking and pitched, I swear to God, exactly loud enough to carry.
The boxes stopped. "What did I ever—Beth, I have never been anything but nice to you.
I have tried. I keep trying. And you twist every single thing, you decide I'm some kind of villain, you make up—you actually think I'd sabotage a wedding to hurt your feelings?
Do you hear yourself?" She pressed the back of her hand to her mouth, tears spilling now, the whole performance flawless.
"I came back to this town with nothing. You have everything.
You have him, you have the wedding, you have a family that loves you, and you can't even let me have a job without deciding I'm out to get you.
I don't have anyone, Beth. I would have killed to have a friend in you.
I even—God, I even went and sat through that whole cake tasting to help Alonzo pick the right one for you two, because I wanted you to be happy, and—"
She stopped.
Her eyes went wide. Her hand flew up to her mouth a second time, but slower now, theatrical, and her gaze cut sideways—past me—to where Alonzo had gone very, very still with a stack of folded linens in his arms.
"Oh," she whispered. "Oh, no. I—Alonzo, I'm so sorry, I wasn't—you said not to—"
The lawn went quiet in that specific way a lawn goes quiet when everyone has just heard the thing they're going to be talking about for a year.
I turned around slowly. I felt myself do it, the whole long pivot, like the ground was turning under me instead.
"Did you take her." It wasn't a question, the way I said it. It came out flat and low and through my teeth. "To Hartsville. To taste our wedding cake. Did you take Lola."
"Bethy—" He set the linens down. He put his hands up, palms out, the way you'd approach something that might bolt. "Okay. It wasn't—it was nothing, she just rode along, I didn't think it—"
"That's not what I asked you." My ears were ringing. "I asked you a yes or no question. Did you take her to pick our cake. Yes. Or no."
He looked at me. And I watched him understand that there was no soft middle to step into, no flooded apartment, no friend in crisis, nothing to be the good guy about—just the bare little fact of it, and his own choice to hide it from me.
"...Yes," he said. "But Beth—"
I don't remember deciding to lose it. I'd been so careful for so long, I'd swallowed so much, I'd been the reasonable one through my dad's birthday and the late nights and the seat at the table and a hundred small evenings I never said a word about—and it all came up at once, hot and shaking and entirely beyond my control, right there behind the catering tents at the Ashford estate with his whole family watching.