"Maeve," says Conrad Whitlock, taking both my hands in the Whitlock House foyer, "I've signed Lior Cosgrove."
He is sixty-three and tanned from Singapore, and he says it the way other men say *I picked up the check*. Lior has done my flowers for eight years. She has never once been late, and she has never once let me down.
"Exclusive," Conrad says. "The Crane Group's hotel openings, effective immediately. She's a talent. Good business for everyone."
"She's my florist."
"Was she under contract to you?" He asks it kindly, still holding my hands. "No. I thought not. Don't look like that, my dear. You'll find someone."
Twenty-eight days. Two hundred and twenty guests, and a lily of the valley order that only Lior knows how to source. I take my hands back and straighten the seating easel beside me, because it is crooked, and because it is something to hold.
"How generous," I say. "Of you to tell me in person."
"I like to look people in the eye," says Conrad, and smiles, and goes in to greet his guests.
At seven the dining room is full, sixty people under the chandeliers, and the first course is on time. Marisol hisses at me from the pass: "Mae-Mae, the sommelier's drunk," and I tell her to give him water and a job. I stand at the back wall with my binder and a plan for everything except this.
Conrad rises before the fish. Glass in hand, silver hair, the whole room turning to him like plants.
"I want to thank our planner," he says. "Maeve Kinsella, ladies and gentlemen, who knows better than anyone what it costs when a groom doesn't show."
Laughter. Warm, surprised, relieved to be allowed. It lasts a second and a half. Then people look at their plates, and then, one table at a time, at me.
I do not move my face. I look at my watch and signal Marisol with two fingers, and the doors open and the fish comes out on the beat, the plates in a clean line.
Rhys is at the head table with his eyes on the tablecloth. Sloane is looking straight at me, and she lifts her glass an inch.
"You hung up on him," Dec says.
He found me on the terrace, where I came to breathe and where I am now timing my breathing. The air is cold off the harbor, with salt in it, and the hotel lights shake on the black water below us.
"I told him what he needed to hear."
"You told him I said something I said to you, behind a closed door, in confidence."
"You said it."
"I said it to *you*." He is not loud. Dec is never loud. His jaw has gone white at the hinge. "Do you know what Rhys did with it? He asked if I meant it. I have spent the afternoon explaining to a man I have known for years that I do not mean it, when I do not know that."
"Then you shouldn't have said it."
"You had no right."
"I had ninety thousand dollars of right." I'm shaking, and it is cold, and I will say it is cold. "Declan Drury, you decided in 2023 that I was better off humiliated. Do not tell me about rights."
He goes quiet. Then, so low I almost lose it: "Green dress. Gold straps. You turned a stopcock with a butter knife and told the table the sorbet was early."
"Stop."
"I did not decide you were better off. I decided you were *alive*." He has stepped closer. I don't remember him doing it. "I held your flowers, Maeve."
Neither of us has moved. His hand has come up and stopped, an inch from my face, as if it is waiting for permission from a court. I can smell rain and cedar and the cold on his coat. I could close the inch. Nobody would see. I want it so cleanly that it frightens me.
And I think of the file on his desk, and of Rhys's call, and of the only person in the building who understands the agreement.
I step back.
"No," I say. "I need you to be the one who tells me the truth, Dec. I can't have you be anything else."
I take my binder and go in, and I don't look back, because I have never been good at walking away and I would like to have this one done properly.
The cellar stairs are stone. I'm down here for a replacement case of the Bordeaux, because the sommelier has dropped one, and because a cellar is the one room in this house with no guests in it.
I find the case. I have my hand on the crate when I hear him on the steps.
"Mae."
Rhys, in his dinner jacket, flushed, a little unsteady. He shuts the door of the cellar behind him and the cold closes over us both.
"You can't be down here."
"I needed to see you." He comes closer. "I made a mistake. In 2023. I think about it every day, you know me, I'm not good at this. I made a mistake, and I never said it to you."
"Rhys."
"Come on, Mae." His voice goes soft, the way it always did when he wanted me to carry something. He takes my face in his hands and leans in.
I put my palm flat against his chest. I don't push. I don't need to.
"No," I say. "You do not get to say that to me in a cellar, four weeks before you marry somebody else. Go upstairs."
He stares at me. His hands drop.
"Mae..."
"Go. Upstairs."
He doesn't answer. He looks past my shoulder, and the color leaves his face in one clean drop.
I turn.
Sloane Whitlock is standing in the cellar doorway, in a dress the color of champagne, with her hand on the frame and her phone held loosely at her side. She has been there long enough. I don't know how long.
"Fitting," she says, pleasant as a bell. "Tuesday, ten. Come alone."