3. Three Women And An Emergency Cake #3
"The estate purchase, five years back. The arbor arch, the two long harvest tables, the iron candle stands.
Beckett bought them through the shop when the wedding was — for the wedding.
" She says leveled, no cushion, watching me the way she watches a beam take weight.
"They never sold them. Still in the estate inventory.
I do their appraisals. I see the list every year.
If this booking happens, somebody with a clipboard is going to suggest using what's on site, because it's beautiful and it's free, and I'd rather you hear it tonight from me than in a walkthrough from a stranger. "
The dusty light goes on being beautiful all around us.
Somebody's church window lays a long red diamond across the floor between her boots and mine, and I stand in it and breathe, in for four, out for four, until the sharp green thing that came up under my collar settles back down where it lives.
"None of those pieces will be used." My voice comes out planner-smooth, which is a mercy. "Not moved, not photographed, not repurposed as anything. If the estate inventory comes up, it's excluded, full stop, and it goes in the vendor contract in writing."
"Understood."
No argument.
Marlowe writes EXCLUSIONS across the top of a fresh clipboard page in her draftsman's capitals, underlines it once, and moves us on to the pink door, which she thinks is hilarious for a cocktail lounge, and that's the entire negotiation, and this is why, out of everyone alive, I brought the question here.
Juniper would have hugged me.
Marlowe just built the boundary into the paperwork.
The email is waiting for me when I get back to the office to lock up. Forwarded from Paloma Crane's office, nine forty-one p.m., subject line Re: Venue Preliminary, and I read it standing in the dark with my keys still in my hand.
The Lantern House has indicated it will not confirm availability, provide quotes, or schedule access until Golden Hour Vows approves direct contact between venue and planner.
The estate states this is at the planner's sole discretion, in writing, with the option to route all communication through intermediaries indefinitely if preferred. Please advise.
I read it four times, which is apparently what I do now with things that rearrange me.
He didn't call…
Five years of silence, the biggest booking either of us will ever see, every professional excuse in the world to pick up a phone, and Beckett Shaw looked at all of it and handed me the door instead.
I shouldn’t be disappointed.
I can’t feel any sort of way when they’re nothing but the past.
This is just a transaction.
A bump in the road that needs supervision to be fixed, smoothed, and repainted so the road can be brand new again and no one would tell what it previously went through.
This scenario is no different…
Her call, every step. It's such a small thing.
It's two sentences of contract language, and I stand in my dark office furious about it, because I was braced for the ambush.
I've been braced for the ambush for five years.
I know what to do with pushy. I have a whole professional voice for pushy, and he's gone and taken it away and left me holding the one thing I never planned for, which is the choice, whole and unforced, mine the way nothing about them was ever mine, and being handed it now, late, gently, by that man, unsettles me more than any campaign of flowers ever could have.
Damn him.
He learned.
You spend five years building your defenses to the exact height of the men who hurt you, and then one of them shows up taller in the one way you didn't wall against.
The phone rings while I'm still standing there.
Tessa.
At this hour, which is wrong twice, and when I pick up I can hear it in her breathing before she gets a word out, the clinic hum behind her, the wobble she'd never allow herself in daylight.
"Amber." She's crying, my unbreakable assistant, and trying to sound like she isn't. "I'm at the after-hours clinic.
They ran bloodwork. I'm okay, they said I'll be okay, but they're ordering me off work.
Medical leave, effective now. Six weeks minimum, no negotiating, they made me hand my calendar to the nurse so I couldn't." A wet, furious laugh. "Six weeks. Amber, the equinox—"
"Don't you dare apologize."
I'm already moving to the desk, already turning on the lamp, because my hands know what to do when the rest of me doesn't.
"Your only job is getting well. Do you hear me? We'll manage."
I say it in my best voice, the one that has ended vendor disputes in three counties, and she believes me, because everyone always believes me, that's the entire product.
Then she hangs up, and I stand alone in my glowing office on Bellflower Lane with eleven active weddings, a celebrity inquiry, a venue holding its breath for my answer, and no Tessa until autumn.
Looking at a calendar that was impossible this morning and has just become something well past impossible, a word I don't currently have, and will need to invent by Thursday.
The tide, I believe I mentioned, comes in faster than predicted.