The Takeover

Seraphina

My mother has been waiting her entire life for this

moment and I am not going to survive it.

It started the morning a!er the engagement dinner. A single phone call at 8 a.m. — which is my mother's version of a polite hour -and

by nine she had a notebook, a color-coded timeline, the private numbers of four Manhattan venues, and a vision board. An actual

vision board, assembled from magazines she apparently keeps specifically for this purpose. I did not know she kept magazines for this purpose. I should have known. I should have planned better.

Within forty-eight hours, Elena Conti had absorbed the wedding planning in the manner of a beautiful, elegant, completely unstoppable force of nature. Maeve Callahan — who I expected to resist, because she seems like a woman who resists most things —arrived at our townhouse on a Tuesday afternoon, sat down across from my mother at the kitchen table, and in approximately four

minutes they had determined between them that this wedding would be the kind of event that Manhattan would not forget quickly. I sat in the corner of the kitchen with a coffee I wasn't drinking and thought: this is what two women who have spent forty years managing powerful men and powerful families look like when they finally get a project they can run themselves. I should be afraid. I am afraid. My father, Fergus Callahan, and Declan were summoned to the first planning meeting under false pretenses, lasted forty-five minutes before they all found reasons to be somewhere else. I envied them deeply, of course Declan noticed, but just smiled and excused hisself. Then my mother said "flowers," and I lasted another twenty-five minutes,

and then I left to go hit the punching bag until my arms gave out, which took longer than usual. The dress is where I draw the line.

"White," my mother says, at dinner, three weeks in. The way she says it is the way she says everything she considers self-evident. "Ivory, at minimum. Traditional. It's expected."

"I'm not wearing white."

Silence. My father looks up from his wine glass. My brothers Matteo, twenty-nine, and Luca, twenty-six both develop sudden intense interest in their food. Luca actually picks up his fork. Luca has been done eating for ten minutes.

"Seraphina," my mother says. In the tone that has been deployed against me, with variable success, for twenty-eight years.

"Seraphina nothing, I have told you multiple times, not wearing white," I say again. "Or ivory. Or anything that could be described as traditional or in this case virginal. I'll wear what I choose and what I choose will be appropriate for the occasion." I look at her steadily. "I am happy to go shopping with or without you. But the decision is ultimately mine and mine alone.”

Another silence. Then my mother looks at me — the real look, not the social one — and something shi!s in her face that I don't see often.

Something that looks almost like pride, though she'll never say so, because Elena Conti demonstrates pride through action not

declaration.

“All right," she says. "We'll go shopping."

Then she pulls out her phone and calls Maeve Callahan. Because of course both Maeve and her daughter is coming too. Of course Siobhan is coming. I find I don't actually mind that. Siobhan, I've decided, is someone I could have found a use for in another life, and in this one she is going to be my sister, and that is — surprisingly — not a terrible thing.