I walk into the Moreau Atelier at ten o'clock with a new lily of the valley grower, a bill that eats the last of my margin, and a confession I have rehearsed since Saturday night. If I tell Sloane Whitlock what happened in her father's cellar, she can fire me and send me an invoice for ninety thousand dollars. If I say nothing, she gets to say it first.
Twenty-five days. Which of us is going to bleed?
"Ms. Kinsella." The seamstress meets me at the door with pins pressed between her lips and chalk on both knees. "She is ready. Please, do not make her cry. It is a very expensive dress."
Sloane is standing on the fitting platform in her wedding gown.
It is ivory silk, close at the waist, and it makes her look like something that has never once been late. Three mirrors throw her back at me from three angles. The room smells of steam and fig, her perfume, and somewhere behind a rack of tulle a steamer hums like a held note.
"Thank you, Elsbeth," Sloane says. "Give us the room."
Elsbeth takes her pins and goes. The door clicks. I put my red binder on a velvet stool, because I need to put something down.
"Before you say anything," I say. "I have a florist. Not Lior Cosgrove, she's Conrad's now, but a grower who will ship the lily of the valley, and I've already paid the deposit. You lose nothing."
"Lovely," says Sloane, and turns a little, so the mirrors turn with her.
I breathe in fig. I say it the way I've practiced it, flat, like a timeline.
"Saturday night, Rhys followed me into the cellar. He said he made a mistake in 2023. He tried to kiss me. I stopped him. I'm telling you because you should hear it from me, and because I would like to keep this job."
The steamer hums. Sloane looks at her own hem.
"Did he kiss you?"
"He tried."
"And you stopped him?" She lifts her eyes, and what's in them is closer to disappointment. "Pity."
"Excuse me?"
"Nothing. Go on. You were telling me how loyal you are."
"I'm telling you I did my job." My voice has gone thin and quick. "I'm telling you I signed a rider on the tenth of April that says I follow your instructions without question, and I've followed every one. The waltz. The cake. The ceremony in the room where I was left. I did it with a smile, and I'm done being your punching bag. So either you tell me what game this is, or I walk, and you can find another planner for two hundred and twenty people in twenty-five days."
"If you walk, Clause Fourteen says the wedding failed through your omission." She says it pleasantly. "That's ninety thousand dollars. You read it. I watched you read it."
"Then fire me."
"No."
"Then what do you *want*?"
Sloane steps off the platform without lifting her skirt, as if the dress is part of her body. She crosses to her bag and takes out her phone. Her thumb moves. She holds it out to me, screen first, and for one second I think she is going to show me a photograph of the cellar.
It is a video.
A woman stands alone at the front of a glass room, in a white dress with a high neck and a great many buttons. Her bouquet is shaking in her hands. She isn't crying. She is looking at the doors, and she is looking at the doors, and she is looking at the doors.
I know the doors. I know the woman. It's me.
"That's the one that went around," I say, stupidly. "Dec got it taken down."
"Look at the top."
A small round picture and a handle I don't recognize, then the word *Private*. Underneath, in gray: *Draft. Saved February 19.* And beside the video, saved as its own file, a close-up still of a bouquet tied in pale blue ribbon, a date stitched along it in white thread. The crooked M. The O.
February nineteenth. The day Sloane found my ribbon in a photograph. The day she began.
The account is hers.
I am standing in a room full of white dresses, hung in plastic like a congregation, and I watch myself wait fifty-two minutes on a stranger's phone. I cannot make my hand reach out for it. I cannot make it stop me looking.
"Conrad," I say. "I was sure it was Conrad."
"Daddy doesn't post things. He pays people to make them disappear." She takes it back. "I posted it. At three in the morning, in my kitchen, with my hair up."
The Beckett Waltz. The lemon and elderflower. The Glasshouse. My bouquet on page one of her folder. Two weeks I have spent bracing for every cruel thing she asked for, and every one of them was aimed past me, at the man who has to walk down that aisle and find me holding the clipboard.
I look at Sloane. For the first time, she doesn't look cool. Her gaze goes to the door and stays there a beat too long. Her hand has found a fold of silk at her hip and is gripping it hard enough to crease it.
"Whose door are you watching?" I ask.
"Nobody's." The hand lets go. The silk stays creased. She smooths it, and she is Sloane again. "And Christmas was a lie. Rhys has never said your name to me. I wanted him to walk into the room you stood in. The same song, the same cake, and you holding the clipboard."
"Why?"
"I needed to see what he does." She tilts her head. "And I needed it to be you."
"I don't understand."
"No." She almost smiles. "That's why it works."
She comes closer, and the fig comes with her, and the three mirrors show me three Maeves who all look the same: very small, in a very quiet room.
"I didn't hire you to plan my wedding, Maeve," Sloane says. "I hired you because you're the only woman Rhys Whitford has ever run from. You signed a rider that says you'll do what I tell you without question until May sixteenth."
Then she picks up my red binder from the stool and holds it out to me, as gently as she'd hand over a bouquet, and for the first time since I met her, her hand is shaking.
"You're going to stop my wedding."