I felt my jaw tighten. “Good morning to you too.”
Vanessa ignored me. She turned to the stylist. “Can you fix this piece? It looks cheap.”
The “piece” was a custom veil that cost more than my monthly rent.
A bridesmaid named Kelsey gave me a sympathetic look from across the room. She had the exhausted expression of someone who’d spent forty-eight straight hours in the blast radius of Vanessa’s personality.
Sophie moved closer to me, suddenly shy. I smoothed her hair and guided her toward an empty chair in the corner.
For the next hour, I watched the familiar machinery of Vanessa’s world grind on. She snapped at the makeup artist for using the wrong shade of rose. She made a bridesmaid cry over the placement of place cards. She sent a catering manager back outside because the lemon slices in the water pitchers were “cut like a motel breakfast buffet.” She complained that Ethan’s mother had chosen a navy dress that photographed “too solemn.”
Everyone laughed nervously. Everyone reassured her. Everyone adjusted.
Because that was what people always did around Vanessa. They called it managing stress. They called it wedding nerves. They called it perfectionism.
Anything but what it was.
At one point, Sophie whispered, “Why is everybody acting like she’s the teacher?”
I nearly laughed. “Because they’re scared of detention.”
That earned me a grin.
Ethan came by shortly before noon. The room shifted the second he walked in, as if a calmer weather system had entered the building. He was tall, dark-haired, clean-cut without looking stiff, and dressed already in charcoal slacks and a crisp white shirt, his tie still undone around his neck.
He kissed Vanessa on the cheek. “How’s my girl?”
“Surrounded by incompetence,” Vanessa replied.
He smiled as though this were a joke he had chosen not to fully hear. Then he spotted Sophie.
“There’s my favorite member of the wedding party.”
