Chapter 3
Rose
The second the massive iron gates of the Connors estate clicked shut behind her, Rose slammed the car into park. The sudden silence of the canyon was deafening. She dropped her forehead onto the steering wheel with a dull thud, the plastic cold against her skin.
“Derek?” she groaned into the leather, her voice muffled and thick with self-loathing. “An attorney? URGH!”
She squeezed her eyes shut, but the darkness didn’t help. The image of Lizanne’s sharp, discerning blue eyes was burned into her eyelids like a solar flare. Lizanne hadn’t just looked at her; she had dissected her.
“A wedding? Really, Rose?” She smacked the wheel once, hard.
The sting in her palms helped ground her, pulling her back from the ledge of a full-blown anxiety attack.
She took a ragged breath. It was done. The lie was out there, vibrating in the universe.
She now had a fiancé named Derek, and he was supposedly marrying her on the fourteenth of December.
She looked at her digital calendar, her finger trembling as she scrolled to the date.
It was a Wednesday.
“Of course, a Wednesday,” she hissed. Only the worst possible day of the week for a wedding.
A Monday, Thursday, or Friday meant you could bridge into a long weekend.
But Tuesdays and Wednesdays? Those were the days you booked when you were desperate—when you wanted to save thirty percent on the venue fee or when you were scraping the bottom of the barrel for catering leftovers.
It screamed “budget.” It screamed “struggling.” It was exactly the kind of detail a high-end planner would never choose for themselves unless they were in a rush.
Lizanne didn’t seem like the type to consult a calendar for someone else’s life, but Rose couldn’t bet her future on a “maybe.” If Lizanne was as meticulous as she seemed, she might do a quick search.
She might look for a wedding registry to see Rose’s taste.
She might Google Rose Delaney + Derek + Wedding.
And she would find nothing but a digital void.
“Shit. Shit. Shit.”
Rose shifted back into drive and pulled onto the winding road. The adrenaline was still humming under her skin, a frantic, vibrating chord that made her foot heavy on the gas.
The 101 South was, predictably, backed up.
The stop-and-go traffic gave her forty-five minutes to cycle through the full emotional spectrum: blistering embarrassment, a strange flick of pride for her ability to lie under pressure, the cold logic of research, and then back to embarrassment again.
By the time she hit her exit, she’d landed on a kind of resigned determination.
She’d come up with a kick-ass proposal for Lizanne and Trina’s wedding. That was the easy part. Then, she’d have to build a digital ghost for her own wedding. She’d have to set up a wedding register, a Pinterest board, and a backstory for her lucky, imaginary groom.
Her phone rang through the car speakers, startling her.
“Well?” Her mother didn’t bother with a greeting. She never did when there was news to be had.
“I’ll tell you when I get home, Mom.”
“That means something happened. Good or bad?”
“It means I’m driving and I can’t think while you’re vibrating through the Bluetooth.”
“Rose Ellen Delaney.”
“Twenty minutes. I’m almost at the apartment.”
“Fine. Your brother is here, by the way. He brought KFC, but he’s already eaten half the biscuits.”
Quinn could always be relied upon to bring junk food.
Rose sighed, feeling a small knot of tension loosen.
At least she wouldn’t have to cook. Quinn’s battered truck was already in the lot when she pulled in, parked crookedly across two spaces.
She looked up at her second-story windows. The TV light flickered inside.
The door opened before Rose could even reach for her keys. Quinn stood there, leaning against the frame with a piece of fried chicken in one hand and a napkin in the other.
“Well? Did you impress the Hollywood star, or are you back to planning Sweet Sixteens for the Valley elite?”
“I don’t know yet,” Rose said, pushing past him.
“But something happened. You’ve got that look. Like when you knew you got an F on your math tests and didn’t want to fess up until Dad got home because you knew he’d go easier on you than Mom.”
Rose went straight to the kitchen and took a long drink of water from the tap. “Something happened. Not quite an F-in-math level bad but… complicated.”
Her mother appeared from the kitchen, a wooden spoon in hand like a scepter. “Sit down. Tell us.”
Rose sat. She laid it out: the icy atmosphere of the estate, the crushing pressure of the reality show, and the moment Lizanne had looked at her like she was a bug under a microscope.
She edited the edges, of course. She left out the way Lizanne’s voice had dropped that octave, and the strange, electric thrill Rose had felt when their eyes met.
Those details stayed tucked away in a private corner of her mind.
The rest she confessed, including the “Derek” of it all.
Quinn started laughing halfway through. He tried to stifle it with a biscuit, failed, and eventually just leaned back and let it run its course. “Derek the Attorney? Rose, that’s awful.”
“Quinn. Stop it.” Her mother did not laugh. She stood by the counter with her arms folded over her apron. “You lied, Rose. To a client. To a famous client.”
“I improvised, Mom! She was done with me. I had thirty seconds before she thanked me for my time and I drove home to spend the next four months explaining to Meridian Credit Services why I needed more time.”
The mention of the debt collectors was a low blow, and she knew it. Her mother’s face softened.
“One lie becomes two,” her mother said softly. “Two becomes a problem.”
“The problem is the sixty thousand dollars Jeremy left on a credit line in my name before he vanished into the ether,” Rose said. “If I get this job, that problem goes away. I can get us out of this apartment. I can put Daisy in a better school. I can stop jumping every time the phone rings.”
A brief silence followed. Quinn had stopped laughing. He looked at his sister, really looked at her, and saw the desperation behind the purple lipstick. He changed the topic to his latest gig—a commercial for a lawnmower company where he played “Man in Background #3.”
Dinner was a quiet affair. Daisy joined them in her pajamas, looking pale but her eyes were bright. It wasn’t until her mother had taken Daisy back to bed that Quinn brought the conversation back to the cliffhanger.
“What are you going to do if she wants to meet him? If she asks ‘Derek’ to join you for a drink?”
“She won’t. She’s too busy planning her own wedding. She wants a huge wedding in less than six weeks. What I’m worried about is the digital footprint. If she looks into this wedding and sees there’s nothing online, the whole house of cards collapses.”
Quinn leaned back, eyes wandering to the bookshelf in the corner. “You know you could use the scrapbook. Turn it into a Pinterest page.”
Rose looked up, confused. “What?”
“The wedding scrapbook. The one you made when you were fifteen. The one you used to hide under your mattress. Winter theme. Candles, white flowers, that glass building situation. You described it to her today, didn’t you?”
Rose stared at him. “You’re right. But I need some sort of photos of Derek…”
“You could use some of you and Jere…”
“No!” The word came out more like a bark than anything else.
“Alright, how about one with me? From behind?”
She thought about that. “I have that New Year’s Eve one. The one where you have that beard.”
“My beard was glorious that year,” Quinn said, grinning. “I’d make a very convincing Derek.”
He stood up, grabbing his jacket. He paused at the door, his expression turning serious. “You know, you could’ve gotten this job by just being great at it, Rose. You didn’t need a pretend wedding.”
“She needed to see a person, Quinn. Not a machine. She didn’t think I could understand ‘the heart’ of a wedding without a ring on my finger.
That…” Oh crap. She looked at her own hand and breathed out a sigh of relief.
She was wearing her Ruby ring. It had been a Sweet Sixteen gift from her father, three days before he’d died.
She wore it on occasion, usually when she needed some sort of encouragement.
It didn’t look like an engagement ring, but it had been on the correct finger. And that had to be enough.
“So... I gave her a heart. I gave her Derek.”
“Mm.” Quinn swung his jacket over his shoulder. “Alright. I guess. Do be careful though, lest that crush you used to have on Lizanne Connors resurfaces.”
Rose’s nostrils flared. “I did not have a crush.”
“Sure you did. Anyway, you have two weddings to build tonight. One real, one fake.”
She had, in fact, had a crush on Lizanne back when she’d been an action movie star ten years ago, before she took over televisions and streaming services the world over as a Regency Duchess.
Rose sat in the quiet after he left, listening to the hum of the refrigerator. She went to her desk, opened her laptop, and opened a new tab.
First, she’d set up a website for herself and Derek, using the photo of Quinn. All you could see was the back of their heads and a hint of a beard. Nobody would know it was Quinn. The beard had been a phase. It would do….
Then she’d set up a registry. She’d call up Kayla, her bff, to buy something and write a message of support. Quinn and her mom too. Her mom had three different email addresses; that should do.
It was going to be a very long night. She had a Regency-themed masterpiece to design for a movie star, and a life to invent for herself.
As she started typing, she felt a strange, cold thrill.
She was an architect now. And Derek? Derek was going to be the most patient, most impressive man Hollywood had ever seen.