“I don’t know why I’m torturing myself,” I told Fergus as I looked at the listing online. The penthouse was still for sale; it hadn’t been bought yet. A part of me felt like maybe I could be given a surprise inheritance or win the lottery, then I would march over there and buy the penthouse.
I needed to face the reality of my situation though. I was never going to live in that clock tower. Hell, I was never even going to set foot in it. And if I was being honest, I probably wasn’t going to be living in my current tiny abode very soon either if I couldn’t find a way to pay off the two mortgages on the property.
Camilla’s family will pay, right? Surely they will.
I would wait a few days, as was polite, then gently ask to settle the invoice. That was good business. Then I would be done with that wedding. I wouldn’t have to see Camilla anymore, and I certainly would never have to see Evan ever again.
“So is the half naked man still in your condo?” Amy asked when I set down my bag of wedding-planning supplies on the café table. Weddings in the City did not yet have an office. One of the reasons I dreamed about that clock tower penthouse was because we’d have a ton of space to work on the main floor with a huge reclaimed wood table to sprawl around.
I had started Weddings in the City as a collaborative so that brides could have a one-stop shop for a beautiful, high-class wedding. Yours truly was the wedding planner. Amy, short and bubbly, created beautiful, locally grown flower arrangements. Sophie baked delicious wedding cakes decorated with her signature sculpted sugar flowers. Elsie cooked the tastiest catering ever. Brea designed and sewed one-of-a-kind, ethereal wedding dresses, and Grace was the wedding photographer extraordinaire.
You’d think with this many awesome ladies, we’d be more put together, but here we were running our business out of a coffee shop in between complaining about how expensive Manhattan was, how terrible New York City men were, and how entitled the brides could be.
Grace scooted her chair over to me.
“Did you seduce naked hot dude with your feminine wiles? Is Evan so infatuated with you that he is now going to pay for a Weddings in the City office?”
“No and no,” I scoffed. “I kicked him out.”
“Did you at least make him pay for the wedding?” Elsie asked in irritation.
“Bride’s family pays,” Sophie said.
“And bride’s family needed to pay before the ceremony,” Elsie countered.
“I’m going to get the money,” I said. “Promise.”
My friends looked skeptical. We were all in the business together, and I knew I had seriously screwed up.
“I had been hoping we could finally rent office space,” Grace said. “Now we may not even be able to afford food.”
“I’m going to call the Sutherlands about it today,” I promised.
“You would think that doing weddings for rich people meant we too would have money,” Sophie said, stabbing her cinnamon bun.
“They are just the worst,” Amy said.
“I hope you weren’t too mean to Evan,” Brea told me. “You’re going to see him again for his half sister Imogen’s wedding.”
“I might see him at the end of the wedding, but only in the audience, if we even survive to make it that far.”
“Why can’t we get nice, sweet brides instead of these terrible bridezillas?”
“No one is as bad as Camilla,” Elsie said. “At least that’s over with.”
“I’ll drink to that,” Sophie said, raising her coffee mug.
“We’re in the home stretch on Imogen’s wedding, ladies,” I said, typing notes on my laptop. “Three months until the big day. We’ve got food tastings scheduled, and I still need to finalize the gift bags.”
“I had a flower arrangement done that looked similar to the pictures she sent me,” Amy complained. “Now she doesn’t want it.”
“You know brides get jittery the closer it comes to the date and they have to make decisions,” I reminded my friends.
“As long as she pays and the wedding goes through. You can’t have two grooms and a feral cat holed up in your tiny condo!” Amy joked.
“I don’t know,” Sophie said with a smirk, “two billionaires at the same time?”
“Oh my god,” I exclaimed, covering my face.
“No good deed goes unpunished!” Amy joked.
That was the story of my life. I was such a people pleaser, such a pushover, that my life was a continuous punishment for trying to make things easier for other people.
It was evening when I was finally back in the tiny condo. It still smelled like Evan. He clearly hadn’t brought any grooming products with him, so that clean, masculine scent that permeated my space was all him. I should light a candle or do laundry, but it did smell good. I looked around. The condo wasn’t going to be mine much longer if I didn’t figure out the payment, and it was my own fault.
Last summer, my mother had called me, begging and crying that she needed money to buy a house. I had tried to hold firm, but she always knew exactly what buttons to push to make me feel guilty. The next day, I had taken out a second mortgage and handed the money over to her.
The bank that handled the transaction was owned by Camilla’s father, Orson Sutherland. Like I said, we do weddings for the wealthy and powerful. So when he asked that I hold the final invoice until after the wedding, I had agreed. Since I was almost immediately behind on the loan payments as soon as I signed the papers, I was hoping to foster some goodwill in renegotiating the terms of the mortgage. Unfortunately, Camilla and her cheating had ruined not just her and Evan’s future but my future as well.
I took a deep breath and dialed the Sutherland Bank.
Be a #ladyboss and tell them to pay you.
I was mid-power pose when Mr. Sutherland’s secretary answered.
“Hi, uh—” I cleared my throat and tried to sound in control. “I was just calling about the final invoice for the wedding. I was wondering if I could go ahead and send it.”
The secretary sniffed. “You can come in and discuss it.”
“Oh, okay. Would tomorrow work?” The line clicked then went dead.
“Bye?”
Great. Of course they were treating us like the hired help, and I supposed, to a billionaire, we wedding planners were just that. I made a note in my calendar to go talk to the Sutherlands tomorrow then prepared the invoice. While I was there, I would bring up refinancing my condo.
What if they don’t pay me? Surely they will, right? It will be fine.
I flopped down on my bed. It smelled like Evan, that clean, masculine scent. Fergus was curled up on the side that Evan had slept on. A strand of brown hair fluttered on a pillow.
“Of course he comes into my house and leaves his hair everywhere,” I grumped as I angrily stripped all the sheets off of the bed and opened the window. “You know what? Sure, the bride’s family pays, but Evan participated in that wedding. I just have to figure out how to make him cut me a check.”
6
Evan
By the time I sat down at my desk on the top floor of my office tower the next morning, I had ten missed calls and twenty text messages from Camilla. I had believed that the one silver lining about being humiliated on my own wedding day was that I was free from Camilla’s scolding and nagging.