The florist's text arrives at 7:02. *Hi Maeve! Just checking the video won't be a thing on the day?*
Under it, the linen company: *Can we move you to payment upfront?* Under that, my mother, three missed calls and a voicemail I don't play. The counter under the video has passed forty thousand.
My mother's voicemail will say *Oh, Maeve*, the way she said it in 2023, and I will answer it by Tuesday. Possibly.
I read the top comment because I cannot not. *She looks like she's waiting for a bus.* It has more likes than anything I have ever made.
Then I look at the post properly, the way I'd check a vendor's invoice. Under the video there is a second image, a still of my bouquet. The ribbon, close up. White stitching, *6.10.23*, and a crooked M.
That photograph is from Yasmin Ford's getting-ready blog post. Yasmin was my photographer. A year later I called her and asked, in a voice I'm not proud of, whether she would take it down, and she took down all of it while I sat on her sofa and watched.
No stranger with a phone did this. Somebody dug up what was deleted, and digging that deep costs money. Somebody with money and reach.
*Have you ever lost a wedding?* Conrad Whitlock asked me yesterday, smiling, and I said *Never.*
Declan Drury calls at 8:40. I let it ring three times, because I'm not an animal.
"The video's a private person without consent," he says. "The still is Yasmin's copyright. I can have a letter to the platform by noon."
"I didn't ask you."
"No."
"I don't want your letter, Declan Drury. I don't want you to do anything."
A pause, exactly long enough to be noticed. "Understood," he says, and hangs up. He has offered me nothing I would have to be grateful for, which is his whole talent. I stand there holding the phone as if it owes me a better argument.
Sloane is on the terrace at Whitlock House with a pot of tea and a seating chart. Fig, her perfume, before I reach her.
"Fire me," I say.
"Good morning."
"Fire me, or issue a statement. Tell people who posted it."
"Who says anyone leaked anything?" She pours a second cup and pushes it toward me. "Sit."
"Your father asked me yesterday if I'd ever lost a wedding. Today there's a video."
"Do you think that's what he meant?" She seems delighted. "I'll mention it to him."
"You have a rider. Without question. Here's my question. Fire me. If I walk, Clause 14 says ninety thousand dollars. If you fire me, it can't touch me."
"Then don't walk." She sips. "No."
"A statement."
"No. A statement tells everyone it matters." She turns the seating chart a quarter inch, straight. "Rhys told me about you at Christmas, you know. Over the sprouts. He was very honest."
I keep my face still. On Thursday, in a hotel corridor, Rhys swore on his father's boat that he had never said my name to her. One of them is lying to me, and I put it on the list, under *Conrad* and over *eat.*
"Why keep me?"
"Who better than the woman he left to make sure he doesn't do it again?" Sloane lifts her cup. "Sixteenth of May, Maeve. Without question. It's on a lovely card."
"You're enjoying this."
"Enormously. Doesn't it clear the head?" She uncaps the green pen and adds a name to the chart. "Do eat something, Maeve. You look like you've been watched."
I leave still employed. It is the worst thing she has done to me yet.
The kitchen is the shortest way out, past the extractor fans, the dish pit hissing steam, and onions sweating in a pan the size of a bass drum. A hand closes on my sleeve and drags me into the service corridor.
"Mae-Mae," Marisol says. She is in her catering blacks, pink in the face. "Okay. Don't say I told you."
"Marisol."
"Sloane owns forty percent of this place. Her mom's shares, Elise, when she died. Conrad hates it. He's hated it for years, and Sloane just sits on them, and everyone in the office goes quiet whenever she walks in." She takes a breath. "I don't know what it means. I just thought you should know it exists."
Forty percent. I turn it over and can't find where it fits. A daughter who owns part of the house her father is paying for her to be married in. A father who hates her for it.
"Thank you," I say.
"I watched it six times." Marisol's voice goes small. "I was in the third row, you know. Fifty-two minutes. I should have come up the aisle. I kept thinking someone would."
"You were twenty-four."
"You were twenty-nine."
"I had a timeline," I say, and reach up and straighten the collar of her blacks, because it is crooked and I can't leave it. She laughs, wetly. Neither of us says anything else. The fans roar. Somewhere a pan lands on a steel counter, hard.
I walk to the bus stop with onions on my hands, because the car I would have walked to belongs to a man at Harbor Auto now. Forty percent. Elise. I say both words to the window the whole way home, as if one of them might answer.
By six, the video is gone. The link says *This content is unavailable.* The still of the ribbon is gone with it.
I don't call him. The florist writes back: *Great, thanks!!* Nobody apologizes. I add a line to the vendor call sheet anyway: *Reconfirm everyone. Twice.* I put my phone face down on the binder and eat a piece of toast over the sink, standing, like a woman who has nothing to be thankful for.
At nine the phone lights up on the binder. Sloane.
*Lovely news. I've moved the ceremony. The Glasshouse had a cancellation on the sixteenth.*