Chapter 2: Centerpieces and Cracks

The thing about weddings is that everyone is performing a version of love they hope is real. The flowers. The dress. The vows said out loud so the universe can hold you to them. I have always preferred to stay behind the performance. It is safer there. The curtain does not fall on the curtain.

Cole, private notes, never sent

Damien Voss's office was the architectural equivalent of him: expensive, cold, and designed to make you feel like you'd arrived slightly underprepared.

Zara had prepared anyway. She always did. She'd shown up seven minutes early  because punctuality was free and the one power move available to people who didn't own buildings  with her proposal binder, her best navy blazer, and a very firm internal rule: do not think about the photograph.

She thought about the photograph the entire elevator ride up.

Forty-second floor. The receptionist was beautiful in the specific way that expensive things were beautiful, flawless, serene, and slightly intimidating. She offered Zara water, sparkling or still, with the manner of someone who had never in her life had a bad Monday. Zara took the still water and sat down and told herself she was fine.

She was absolutely fine.

"Ms. Cole."

He was already standing in the doorway. No warning, no assistant announcement, he simply appeared, the way authority figures in films did when they wanted you to know that time worked differently for them. Dark suit, open collar, the kind of jaw that sculptors wept over. He was, Zara noted with the detached professionalism she was desperately clinging to, exactly as attractive in person as the internet had suggested.

This was not useful information. She filed it away under Things That Are Irrelevant and followed him inside.

His office had floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Lagos skyline, which meant that the entire city was behind him when he sat down, arranged like a backdrop someone had commissioned specifically to make him look more powerful. It was, she thought, either a deliberate choice or the most accidentally on-brand thing she had ever witnessed.

"Walk me through your approach," he said. No small talk, no how was your weekend?. The man did not do warm up laps.

So neither did she.

She opened the binder. She talked timelines, vendor strategy, contingency plans. She told him about the three weddings she'd saved from logistical collapse in the last eighteen months  the florist who had delivered orchids when the brief said peonies, the string quartet that showed up to the wrong venue, the groom who had fainted twice and had to be revived with puff-puff. She was precise and calm and mildly funny in the dry way that made people laugh before they realised they were laughing.

Damien Voss did not laugh.

He watched her the way people watched things they were deciding whether to trust  not unkindly, but completely. Like he was running calculations she couldn't see.

"You've planned three hundred and twelve weddings," he said, when she finished. Not a question. He'd done his homework.

"Three hundred and thirteen, as of Saturday."

Something moved across his face. Not quite a smile. The preliminary sketch of one. "And how many of those couples are still married?"

"I plan the wedding, Mr. Voss. What happens after is between them and God."

This time it was definitely a smile. Brief, controlled, gone almost before it arrived  but there. She noticed it the way you noticed a light turning on in a building you thought was empty.

"You're hired," he said.

Just like that. No negotiation, no further questions. She had prepared three pages of rebuttals and he hadn't needed a single one.

She told herself this was efficient. She told herself this was good.

She did not examine why it felt like something else entirely.

The first planning session was three days later at the venue, a colonial era estate an hour outside the city, draped in bougainvillea and the particular arrogance of old money. Zara arrived with her team. Damien arrived alone, which she found strange for a groom but didn't say.

He had opinions. Structured, specific opinions that he delivered without apology, the table arrangements were wrong, the proposed lighting was theatrical without purpose, the centerpiece concept was "what every other wedding in Lagos looks like." Her coordinator, Bisi, was mouthing apologies behind his back. Zara was not apologising. She was writing notes and pushing back with the particular energy of someone who had been right about flowers more times than she could count.

"The classic arrangement works because guests can see each other across the table," she said, indicating the mock setup. "Conversation is the point of a reception, not the decor."

"Then why does every reception feel like nobody talked?"

She opened her mouth. Closed it, Opened it again. "...That's actually a fair point."

He looked at her steadily. "I know."

She hated that she almost smiled.

Then Celeste arrived.

She swept in forty minutes late, which she did not acknowledge, with a coordinator of her own and opinions that were the decorative opposite of Damien's   maximalist, glittering, each one delivered with the breezy confidence of someone who had never once been told no by the universe. She was stunning in the objective way certain people simply were, and she spoke to Zara the way certain stunning people sometimes did: just slightly past her, as though Zara were a very helpful piece of furniture.

"We'll want more flowers," Celeste said, surveying the room. "Everything. More."

"More is a direction," Zara said pleasantly. "I'll need something slightly more specific to brief the florist."

Celeste blinked at her. Then turned to Damien. "She's funny."

Damien did not respond. He was looking at the centerpiece. Or pretending to.

Zara watched the two of them occupy the same room and thought, with the trained eye she'd spent a decade sharpening: these people have never once argued about flowers. They have never argued about anything. The silence between them was not comfortable. It was careful. There was a difference. She knew it the way she knew seating charts and structural floral arrangements  instinctively, in her bones, without being able to explain why.

She did not write that in her notes.

She wrote:

Centerpieces: rethink. Lighting: rethink. Everything else: to be confirmed.

And underneath it, smaller, in the margin, barely legible:

Something is wrong here.

She crossed it out before anyone could see.

She was the last to leave the estate that evening, double-checking vendor access points by torchlight because that was the kind of person she was. The bougainvillea looked different in the dark, less decorative, more wild, like it had been pretending all day and had finally stopped.

She was almost in her car when her phone buzzed.

Unknown number. Again.

She answered, half expecting his voice. It wasn't.

Silence. Then, low and deliberate, a voice she didn't recognise   neither male nor female, levelled and flat as a threat that had been rehearsed:

"Walk away from the Voss wedding. This is your only warning."

The line cut dead.

Zara stood very still in the dark, bougainvillea rustling somewhere above her, the estate lights dimming one by one behind her as the last of the staff left.

Footsteps. Slow and deliberate, coming from the tree line to her left.

She turned.

Nothing. Just the dark and the wind and the wild bougainvillea pretending again.

She got in the car. She locked the doors. She sat for a moment with both hands on the wheel, breathing the way she'd taught anxious brides to breathe  slow, counted, controlled.

Then she started the engine.

She told herself she was not scared. She was a professional. She had handled collapsing wedding arches, fainting grooms, and a mother-of-the-bride who had once thrown a bouquet at a caterer. She could handle an anonymous phone call.

She pulled out onto the dark road.

Her eyes went to the rearview mirror once. Twice.

The car that had been parked behind her when she arrived was gone.

She hadn't seen it leave.