I hand Sloane Whitlock her cream linen folder at two o'clock sharp, and she takes it without a flicker. No question about whether I opened it. Either she doesn't know what page one is, or she wants me to see that she doesn't mind.
"Lovely," she says. "Sit anywhere."
The boardroom at Whitlock House smells of lemon furniture oil, and the table is still tacky under my palms. Rhys has taken the window and his phone. Dec sits at the far end with a pen he isn't using, and he doesn't look up when I come in.
The woman at the head of the table does. Grace Adebayo, fifty-eight, senior partner at Wexley Hartigan, silver hair cut like a ruling. She shakes my hand once.
"Mr. Whitlock sends his regrets from Singapore," she says. "The deposit is drawn on Whitlock Holdings. He has signed it personally."
It sits beside her elbow. Thirty thousand dollars, *C. Whitlock* in black ink, the C like a fishhook. Friday, five o'clock. I read the contract slowly, because I always do, and because my hands need somewhere to be.
Clause 14 is on the fourth page. If the wedding does not take place by reason of the Planner's act or omission, the Planner refunds the deposit and pays liquidated damages of sixty thousand dollars.
I do the sum before I want to. Ninety thousand. I have never had ninety thousand dollars. I have a bank that wants twenty-four nine by tomorrow.
Clause 22, further down: *The Client may assign this agreement.* The Client is Sloane. I look at Sloane. She is adjusting her ring.
"Strike both."
Dec has said it to the table, flat and exact, the way you read out a time of death. Adebayo turns her head.
"Declan. You are here as a courtesy to Mr. Whitford."
"Then I'm courteously saying strike both."
Under cover of her next sentence he slides his pen two inches toward me, not looking. His voice is barely there. "Conrad always has a fall guy. And your client is Sloane, not her father. Remember that."
"I'd like fourteen struck," I tell Adebayo.
"Non-negotiable. Mr. Whitlock's instruction."
"Then give me a cap. Half."
"Non-negotiable."
I look at the pen Dec pushed toward me, a good one, heavy. I take my own.
I initial every page. I sign the last one with a clean, ordinary signature, the one I use for caterers, and Adebayo slides the check across with two fingertips. I know exactly what I have signed. That is the whole cost, and nobody in the room is going to let me forget it, least of all me.
Marisol catches me outside the elevators. My sister is twenty-seven and the banquet manager here, in black with a headset around her neck, and she has clearly been running.
"Please tell me you did not just sign," she says.
"Marisol."
"Mae-Mae. Her father fires planners. And florists. The florist had to find out from the *valet.*" She lowers her voice as the boardroom door opens. "This is the worst idea you've ever had, and you once catered a funeral with a bouncy castle."
"Thirty thousand dollars," I say, and show her the corner of the check.
She stops talking. Then she sees who is coming down the corridor, swears softly, and goes back to her headset.
Rhys is walking toward me with his coat over his arm, and I do not wait for him to reach the elevators. I step into his path.
"Did you give her my bouquet?"
He actually laughs, short and surprised. "What?"
"Page one of her vision folder. My ribbon. My stitching. Rhys, did you give it to her?"
"Mae. No." His face goes open and earnest, the face he used on the harbor master. "I haven't said your name to her. Not once. I swear on the yard, on my dad's boat."
It would be so easy to believe him. That is the oldest trick he has.
"Then how does she have it?"
"I don't know. Come on. A photo, a magazine, I don't know. You were in that paper." He reaches out and picks a thread off my sleeve, the way he did on the steps of every venue we ever toured, without thinking, and my body leans two degrees toward him before I catch it. "You still stand like that. Weight on the left, like you're about to lift something."
Four years, and he can still tell what I'm about to carry.
"Thirty-eight thousand four hundred," I say.
His hand drops. "Mae."
"Your half. Of the wedding. I'm still paying the loan, Rhys. Every month."
"I know. I know. It's not that simple, the yard's been..." He rubs the back of his neck. "I'll sort it. You know me."
"I do," I say. "That's what the loan is for."
He gives me the smile, the sorry one without the word in it, and he is already looking past me, because the doors have opened and Sloane is stepping out of the elevator with her bag on her wrist.
"Oh, good, you're both here." She pushes the button for the lobby and holds it. "One small thing, Maeve. For the processional, I'd like the quartet to play the Beckett Waltz."
Rhys goes still. Completely still, like a man who has heard a floorboard in a dark house.
The Beckett Waltz. I chose it for one reason. I was going to walk to it. I never did.
"Of course," I say.
"Lovely." She looks at Rhys, then at me, pleasantly. "You know it?"
"It's popular."
The elevator closes on her. Rhys studies the floor numbers. I write *Beckett Waltz, quartet* on my pad, and the pen goes straight through the paper.
At 4:43 I am in the line at First Harbor on Dockery Street with the check flat against my chest. The branch closes at five. A child is licking the window.
At 4:50 I am at the glass. The teller, a young man with a name tag that says Marcus, takes the check, types, and stops typing.
He picks up the phone beside him. Speaks into it quietly. Looks at me.
"Ms. Kinsella, I'm sorry. I'm going to need you to step to the side."
"I have until five."
"Yes, ma'am." He turns the monitor a few degrees toward me, so I can read it, and I do. "The check has been stopped by the account holder. C. Whitlock."