CHAPTER 9: THREE DAYS

Three days turned out to be barely enough time to plan a wedding and exactly enough time for Temi's entire life to rearrange itself around a man she'd known for less than a week.

Elias's people, as he'd called them, materialized within hours of their return from the estate, a small, terrifyingly efficient team that made Sable's earlier efforts look almost casual by comparison. A woman named Priscilla handled the venue, a private chapel upstate that had apparently hosted three generations of quiet Voss family ceremonies, the kind of place that didn't appear on wedding blogs because it had never needed the publicity. Florists arrived and departed within a single afternoon. A caterer Temi had never met sent over a tasting menu she didn't have time to fully appreciate between phone calls. A stylist named Remy showed up at Temi's studio with two garment bags and a look of polite panic at the timeline, measuring her in the middle of the Whitmore conference room while Pri watched from the doorway with an expression somewhere between delight and disbelief.

"I need you to understand," Pri said, once Remy had gone, "that I am one hundred percent supportive of whatever is happening in your life right now, and also that this is objectively insane." She said it lightly, but there was something serious underneath the joke, the particular worry of a friend who had watched Temi absorb far too much on her own for far too long.

"I know."

"Three days ago you were fitting a bridesmaid dress for someone else's wedding."

"I know, Pri."

"I just want it on the record that I said insane, out loud, to your face, before any of this happens." Pri softened, crossing the room to sit on the edge of the drafting table beside Temi. "Are you okay? Actually okay, not performing okay for the room."

Temi considered the question longer than she expected to. "I don't know yet. Ask me again after Saturday." She looked down at her own hands, steady despite everything, and found that fact almost more surprising than the question itself. She'd expected to feel more afraid than she did, standing at the edge of something this irreversible.

The days blurred together after that in a way Temi would later struggle to fully reconstruct, a wedding dress fitting compressed into forty minutes instead of the usual weeks, a marriage license appointment squeezed between a Whitmore client call and a security briefing about which entrances to the chapel would be watched by photographers. She signed her name on more documents in those three days than she had in the previous three years combined, half of them barely skimmed before Priscilla's assistant whisked them away to the next station. Adrian called twice a day, brief, efficient updates mostly, guest list finalized, security confirmed, Marcus notably absent from the invitation list entirely, a decision Adrian delivered with no explanation and Temi didn't ask him to justify.

On the second night, unable to sleep, Temi found herself back at her kitchen table with Adrian's original contract sheet spread out beside a legal pad covered in her own handwriting, trying to map out everything that would change once she signed her name beside his in front of a chapel full of strangers who would call themselves family by morning. Her phone buzzed. Adrian.

*Can't sleep either. Are you awake.*

*Yes.*

*Can I call you.*

Temi stared at the message for a moment, surprised by the question itself, by the fact that a man who negotiated eight figure real estate deals apparently still asked permission before a phone call at midnight. She typed back a single word, and her phone rang thirty seconds later.

"I keep running the numbers on how fast this is happening," Adrian said, no greeting, his voice lower and rougher than she was used to hearing it, stripped of the boardroom polish he wore during the day. "And I keep landing on the same conclusion. It's insane. I know it's insane. I wanted to say that out loud to someone who isn't billing me by the hour to help me manage it."

Temi laughed, startled into it, the first real laugh she'd had in days. "Pri used that exact word on me yesterday."

"She's not wrong."

"No," Temi agreed. "She's not."

They talked for almost an hour after that, about nothing important, the kind of conversation two people had when they were too tired to keep performing the versions of themselves they usually presented to the world. Adrian told her, unprompted, about summers spent at the Hudson Valley estate as a boy, before his mother died, before everything went the way it went, fishing off a dock with his grandfather while his parents argued somewhere inside the house, loud enough to carry across the water. He described the specific quiet of that dock at dusk, the way the water went still and gold right before the sun dropped behind the tree line, like it was the only place in his childhood that had ever felt entirely safe. Temi told him about growing up the daughter everyone described as sensible, the one who got scholarships instead of prom dates, who learned early that being needed was safer and more reliable than being wanted.

"I don't think that's true anymore," Adrian said quietly, after a pause long enough that Temi thought the call might have dropped. "The part about being wanted. For what it's worth."

Temi didn't know what to say to that, so she said nothing at all, and the silence between them stretched out comfortable rather than awkward, two people sitting alone in separate apartments across the city, somehow less alone than they'd been in a long time. Outside her window, the city carried on the way it always did, indifferent to the fact that somewhere inside two ordinary apartments, something neither of them had planned for was quietly beginning to take root.

The morning of the wedding arrived faster than Temi felt prepared for, despite three full days of preparation that should have made her feel anything but unprepared. Remy arrived at dawn with the finished dress, simple and elegant, ivory silk with none of the elaborate beading Camille's dress had featured, a choice Temi suspected Elias's team had made deliberately, a wedding that looked nothing like the one that almost happened, on purpose. The chapel itself, when Temi caught her first real glimpse of it through the dressing room window, looked smaller and older than she'd pictured from Priscilla's description, weathered stone and stained glass windows that had clearly seen more than a century of Voss family history pass through its doors, none of it, Temi suspected, quite as strange as what was about to happen inside it today.

Pri stood behind her in the mirror an hour later, fastening the last button at the back of the dress, both of them quiet in the private dressing room of the upstate chapel, distant sounds of guests arriving filtering through the walls. Someone outside laughed at something, a car door shut, footsteps crossed gravel, all of it strangely ordinary for a morning that felt to Temi like it belonged to someone else's life entirely.

"You look beautiful," Pri said softly. "For what it's worth, whatever this is, contract or not, you look like a woman who belongs in that dress, not a woman playing a part."

Temi met her own eyes in the mirror, searching for the uncertainty she expected to find there and finding, instead, something steadier than she anticipated. "Thank you for not saying insane again."

"I'm thinking about it very loudly. I'm just not saying it."

A knock at the door interrupted them, one of Priscilla's assistants poking her head in with an apologetic expression. "Ms. Callahan, we have a small situation. Nothing urgent, but Mr. Voss asked me to let you know before the ceremony starts."

Temi's stomach tightened immediately. "What kind of situation."

"A guest arrived who wasn't on the confirmed list. Security is handling it, but given the name, Mr. Voss thought you should be aware before you walk out there."

"What name?"

The assistant hesitated, glancing back over her shoulder like she was checking whether it was actually her place to say it out loud.

"Camille Whitfield," she said finally. "She's outside the chapel right now, asking to speak with you before the ceremony begins."

Pri's hand froze on the final button of Temi's dress. Behind them, through the thin chapel walls, Temi could hear the low murmur of guests settling into their seats, the quiet, expectant hush of a room waiting for a wedding to begin, utterly unaware that the bride at its center had just gone completely still, staring at her own reflection in the mirror, trying to decide whether walking outside to face her best friend right now was the bravest thing she could do or the worst possible mistake of the entire week.

"Temi." Pri's voice was careful, gentle in a way it rarely was. "You don't have to see her. Not right now. Not if you're not ready."

"I know," Temi said quietly, still staring at her own reflection, at the woman in the ivory dress who barely looked like herself anymore. "But I don't think I can walk down that aisle without finding out what she wants to say first."

Pri nodded slowly, stepping back to let her go, and Temi turned toward the door before she could talk herself out of it, one hand pressed flat against her stomach as though that alone could steady the sudden unsteady rhythm of her own heartbeat.