Chapter 13 Darcy
The Whitcombe wedding was my first real test at Bellweather House, two hundred and ten guests, the bride who called me twice a day with new ideas, and a budget that had been set the month before I arrived and left almost no room for improvisation.
I liked the bride immediately, her enthusiasm, the way she talked about her fiancé like she still couldn't quite believe her luck, and it was exactly that liking her that got me into trouble three weeks into the contract.
"I just think the ceremony arch needs to be bigger," the bride said, sitting across from me in Bellweather's front office with a stack of inspiration photos spread between us, each one more elaborate than the last. "Like, dramatically bigger. Can we do that?"
"I think we can find a way to make it feel more dramatic," I said, already turning the idea over for how to solve it, some old reflex kicking in before I'd fully thought through what it would cost. "Let me look at the florist's availability and see what we can do."
I said yes to eleven such requests before Irene caught wind of what I'd been quietly agreeing to, most of them small on their own, cumulatively enormous, a bigger arch, upgraded linens, a late addition of a champagne wall that the bride had seen on someone else's wedding and simply had to have.
Each individual yes had felt entirely reasonable in the moment, a florist quote here, a linen upgrade there, and it wasn't until I sat down to reconcile the running total on a Wednesday night, alone at my kitchen table with a calculator and a mounting sense of dread, that I saw exactly how much I'd actually let happen.
By the time Irene called me into her office on a Thursday afternoon, I'd blown through the contingency budget and another fifth of the original total without formally amending the contract for any of it.
"You've been saying yes to everything this client asks for.
" Irene didn't raise her voice, which somehow made it worse, the flat, factual delivery of someone pointing out an error rather than assigning blame.
"I don't do that here, Darcy. Every one of these changes needs a line item and a signature, or it comes out of our margin instead of hers.
You know this. You've run events before. "
"I know. I got caught up in wanting to make her happy." I felt my face heat, an old, familiar shame rising that had nothing to do with Irene and everything to do with twelve years of believing my worth was measured by how easily I could make everyone around me comfortable. "I'll fix it."
"Good. Because it's yours to fix, not mine.
" Irene slid the contract folder across the desk toward me.
"I'm not going to call this client and tell her no on your behalf.
You built this problem with her, so you're the one who's going to have the conversation about what she can actually have within her budget.
That's the job, Darcy. Not just planning the pretty parts.
Managing the parts that aren't pretty at all. "
I spent that evening rebuilding the numbers, isolating exactly what could still fit inside the remaining budget and what couldn't, and asked the bride to meet me at the venue the next morning before I could talk myself into putting it off.
It was, without question, one of the more uncomfortable conversations I'd had in years, walking her line by line through what I could still deliver and what I'd been wrong to promise so easily, watching her disappointment shift toward something more like understanding as I offered real alternatives instead of empty apology.
"I really appreciate you being straight with me," the bride said, by the end of the meeting, sounding relieved rather than angry, which surprised me more than it should have. "Honestly, most vendors just tell me yes and then it turns into a fight later about the invoice. This is better."
The bride called back an hour later, this time to ask my opinion on a smaller, more reasonable version of the champagne wall, something that fit inside the actual budget without losing the effect she'd wanted, and I found myself enjoying the problem-solving of it, sketching options while we spoke the way I used to sketch them a decade earlier, before any of it had become invisible labor performed for people who never thought to ask what it cost me.
I hung up feeling something unfamiliar settle into place, the satisfaction of having handled something hard by being direct instead of accommodating, of protecting a budget and a relationship at the same time instead of sacrificing one to preserve the other.
I told Irene it was resolved, walked her through the revised numbers, and watched her nod once, brief and unsentimental, the closest thing to praise I'd get from her and somehow more meaningful for how little of it there was.
"You did that well," she said, closing the folder. "Most people either fold completely or dig in and lose the client. You found the version where everyone stays happy and the numbers still work. That's rarer than you'd think."
"I had a lot of practice smoothing things over with people who weren't actually going to be reasonable about it." I said it lightly, but Irene's eyes sharpened slightly, the way they did when she heard something underneath a sentence she wasn't going to comment on directly.
"Well. Whatever taught you that, it's useful here." She handed the folder back to me. "Just remember the difference. Here, you're allowed to say no. That's the whole point of the job."
I carried that sentence with me the rest of the day, turning it over during the drive home, allowed to say no, a permission I was still learning to extend to myself in every part of my life, not only the parts with an invoice attached.
I stopped at a grocery store on the way home for no reason other than needing somewhere to keep moving, and stood too long in the produce aisle turning the sentence over in my head, allowed to say no.
I tried to remember the last time anyone had told me that directly, that plainly, without wrapping it in some larger obligation I was still expected to honor around the edges of it.
Maxine had been telling me something similar for weeks, but I had never expected to hear it at work, and standing there with a bag of apples in one hand, I felt the strange grief of understanding how long I'd gone without hearing something so basic said out loud.
I'd moved into the apartment the week before, boxes still stacked in the corners of the living room, most of my furniture secondhand or borrowed from Maxine's overflow storage, and none of it matching in any way that would have passed muster with Claudette.
I loved it anyway, loved the bay window especially, the way morning light came through it and pooled on the floor without any regard for anyone's approval but my own.
Maxine had helped me haul most of the furniture in over a single exhausting Saturday, and had insisted, over my protests, on buying me a small framed print for the bare wall above the couch, something bright and slightly absurd, a painting of a rooster she'd found at an estate sale.
"Every first apartment needs one truly ugly, deeply loved object," she'd said, hanging it herself while I unpacked dishes.
"This is yours." I kept it there through everything that followed, a small, ridiculous anchor in a room otherwise still finding its shape.
Tyler and I had agreed to meet there on a Sunday afternoon to go through some of the practical matters Judith's office had flagged, insurance, a joint account that needed addressing, a storage unit for furniture neither of us wanted to decide about yet.
He arrived exactly on time, which I noted and appreciated more than I expected to, standing a little awkwardly in the doorway until I waved him in.
"This is nice," he said, looking around at the boxes, the mismatched chairs, the bay window with its single plant I'd bought on impulse and hadn't yet managed to kill. "Really nice, Darcy. It suits you."
"Thank you." I set out the paperwork on the small kitchen table, aware of him taking in the details of the place, the framed photo of me and Maxine from a trip years ago, the stack of Bellweather contracts by the window, small evidence of a life he hadn't been present for the building of.
"Coffee? I don't have much else to offer yet. "
"Coffee's good."
He'd brought his own copy of everything Judith's office had sent over, tabbed and highlighted in a way that surprised me, and set it beside mine on the small table without commenting on the difference in size between his stack and my modest kitchen.
"I went through it twice before coming over," he said, catching me noticing.
"I wanted to actually understand it instead of just signing where your lawyer told me to sign.
Figured that was the least I could do, given everything. "
We worked through the paperwork methodically, insurance forms that needed both our signatures, a conversation about the joint account that stayed businesslike in a way I was grateful for, no undertone of negotiation dressed up as logistics.
Tyler followed my lead on nearly everything, deferring to whatever I'd already decided rather than pushing for his own preference, and I noticed it, the absence of the old pattern where every practical decision had somehow ended up shaped around what was easiest for him.
"You've got a job," he said, at one point, nodding toward the Bellweather contracts. "You didn't tell me."
"I didn't think I needed to." I said it evenly, not as an accusation, just a fact. "It's mine. I wanted it to be mine for a while before it became something I had to explain to anyone."
"That's fair." He looked at the contracts a moment longer, something moving behind his expression that might have been pride or might have been grief, possibly both at once. "I'm glad. Genuinely. You were always better at this than anyone gave you credit for."
"I used to be good at it, a long time ago.
I'm finding out I still am." I said it without false modesty, watching him take that in without trying to claim any part of it for himself, no old reflex to remind me he'd always believed in me, no attempt to fold my accomplishment back into evidence of his own support.
He just nodded, letting it be entirely mine.
We finished the paperwork just before four, and I could feel him not wanting to leave, some old gravity pulling at the edges of the conversation, a lingering over the last signature, a slower folding of the papers than the task required.
I felt it too, if I was honest with myself, the pull of twelve years of habit sitting right there in my small kitchen with its mismatched chairs.
"I should get going," he said instead, standing, gathering his copies of the paperwork into a neat stack. "You said four."
"I did." I walked him to the door, surprised by how much I appreciated that he'd held to it, that he hadn't tried to extend the visit with some reasonable-sounding excuse the way the old version of him might have. "Thank you for coming. And for not making this harder than it needed to be."
"I'm trying." He paused at the door, close enough that I could feel the pull of him even now, and didn't reach for me, which felt like its own kind of restraint. "I know that's not the same as doing it right yet. But I'm trying."
I closed the door and returned to the table.
Tyler's cup was empty, his copies of the paperwork gone.
We had finished what we agreed to do, and he had left when he said he would.
I rinsed the cups, then stood by the bay window until his car pulled away.
I had enjoyed seeing him. For now, I could let that be enough without deciding when to see him again.