Chapter Two

I set my glass down slower than I needed to, buying myself half a second nobody else could see me spending.

"To Ivy," I said, and the terrace went quiet enough that I could hear the string lights humming above us. "Who has spent her entire life making things look effortless. The house, the guest list, tomorrow. All of it. I've watched her do it since we were kids, and I still don't know how she manages it without ever once looking like she's trying." I lifted the glass higher, found her eyes across the table, and let the next part come out steadier than I felt. "Callum, you're getting the version of her that makes hard things look easy. I hope you know how rare that actually is."

The laugh that went up was real, warm, relieved, the exact sound of a room that had been braced for something awkward and gotten a compliment instead. Ivy's hand found her heart, theatrical and genuine at once, and she mouthed something at me across the table that might have been thank you or might have just been good enough, with Ivy it was always hard to tell which.

"You almost made me believe you liked me for a second there," she said later, catching me by the drinks table once the toasts had wound down and the party had scattered into smaller conversations.

"I do like you. Occasionally."

"High praise, coming from you." She squeezed my arm, already scanning the crowd for someone more interesting to land on. "Four more days, then I get to stop planning things and just be married."

"Four more days," I agreed, and had no idea yet how much weight that sentence was about to carry.

Those four days blurred fast. My mother called Monday morning before I'd even had coffee, already mid-crisis.

"The florist says the peonies I wanted aren't available until June."

"It's not June."

"I'm aware it's not June, Odessa, that's the problem." A pause, dramatic, practiced. "Do you think ranunculus reads as a downgrade?"

"I think nobody at this wedding is going to know the difference between a peony and a ranunculus."

"You wouldn't." She hung up before I could decide whether that was an insult, and called back forty minutes later to inform me she'd chosen the ranunculus and it was, in fact, better, and also that I should arrive at the estate Thursday with my father since parking was going to be "a nightmare" with the caterers running tastings in the same lot.

A client fired off a strongly worded email Tuesday about the hedge maze he'd already lost the fight over once, which I answered with a single line reminding him the fountain would still block the sightline regardless of how many times he asked. Wednesday disappeared into paperwork. By Thursday I'd stopped counting the days at all, which was exactly when they caught up with me.

The seating chart dinner happened at the Ashford estate that evening, smaller than the engagement party, just family and two board members finalizing table assignments for a reception that apparently required a spreadsheet longer than my last three client contracts combined. I'd been roped into attending because Helena wanted "family input," which mostly meant sitting quietly while she debated whether a particular cousin could be trusted near the open bar.

My father drove, the way my mother had insisted, and spent most of the ride with the radio low and his eyes on the road, the kind of comfortable silence we'd perfected over twenty-six years of not needing to fill every gap.

"You nervous for tomorrow?" he asked, at a red light.

"It's not my wedding."

"That wasn't the question." He glanced at me once, brief, the kind of look that saw more than I wanted him to. "You've been quiet all week."

"I'm always quiet."

"Not like this."

I didn't have a real answer, so I let the light change instead. The estate came into view a few minutes later, lit gold against the evening like it always was, and a valet took the keys before either of us had fully unbuckled.

The terrace was set with candles instead of the string lights from before, quieter, more clinical somehow, like the house itself knew this dinner was meant to be about logistics rather than celebration. My father sat beside me, patient through two rounds of table-number debates, occasionally catching my eye across the table with the specific look of a man counting down the minutes until he could reasonably leave.

"He's not banned," Helena was saying to one of the board members, a thin, silver-haired man named Preston who kept glancing at his watch like the seating chart owed him money. "He's monitored. There's a difference."

"There's a bar tab that suggests otherwise."

"That was one wedding."

"That was three weddings, Helena."

"He's my nephew, Preston, not a liability report."

"Tonight he's both."

My mother laughed at that harder than it warranted, the kind of laugh she saved for rooms she wanted to belong in, and I was halfway through a plate of something with too much saffron in it when Dr. Wexler arrived.

He came in through the terrace doors with the specific, careful walk of a man rehearsing something in his head, and something about his face stopped the low buzz of table conversation before he'd even said a word.

"James." Desmond half rose from his chair, genuinely pleased, the way he always seemed to be around people he considered old friends rather than staff. "Didn't expect to see you tonight. Everything alright?"

"Desmond, do you have a minute?" he said, low, clearly meaning to pull him aside.

"Whatever it is, you can say it here." Helena waved a hand toward the table without looking up from her spreadsheet. "We're all family."

"Helena, I really think this should wait until-"

"James." Her voice sharpened just slightly, the tone of a woman used to being obeyed the first time. "Sit down and say what you came to say."

He didn't sit. My father set down his fork slowly beside me, some instinct in him already reading the room the way mine was, and Preston's pen went still against his seating chart.

Dr. Wexler's eyes moved once, briefly, to Ivy, who had gone very still at the far end of the table, her fork frozen halfway to her plate. Something in his expression shifted, the look of a man realizing there was no version of this that didn't happen exactly the way he'd been dreading.

"I wanted to speak to you both privately," he said, "about the results from Ivy's pre-marital screening."

"It's fine, James." Desmond set down his wine glass, smiling the easy smile of a man who'd never once received bad news he couldn't fix with a phone call. "Tell us."

I watched Ivy's hand tighten around her fork. I watched my mother's smile hold perfectly still, the way it does right before something breaks. Even Preston had stopped pretending to look at his seating chart, pen hovering, waiting.

"The screening came back," Dr. Wexler said, and every person at that table leaned in without meaning to, "showing a fertility issue significant enough that natural conception isn't going to be possible."

Nobody moved. Nobody breathed. Preston's fork stopped halfway to his mouth and simply stayed there, forgotten, and Helena's spreadsheet slid an inch across the table without anyone touching it. The only sound on the entire terrace was the clink of a server setting down a dish two tables over, oblivious, and Ivy's fork finally slipping from her fingers to land against the plate with a sound that felt, in that silence, like something shattering.

Then, all at once, everyone at that table started talking, and none of it made a single bit of sense.