Chapter 2 - The Sixty-Minute Miracle
The sound that followed was the deafening roar of three six-ton turbo-diesel engines descending upon the gravel turnaround of Cedar and Oak.
It was 3:42 PM.
I stood on the second-story balcony of the bridal suite, watching like a commanding general overlooking a battlefield. The three Larkspur & Co. trucks swung into the service drive with their air brakes hissing violently, kicking up plumes of gray dust that caught the golden afternoon sunlight. Behind the third truck was an unmarked black-and-white county cruiser, its roof lights flashing silently to ensure the convoy was not impeded.
Deputy Vance had done his job.
Before the wheels had even come to a complete stop, the cab doors flew open. Travis dropped down onto the gravel, a walkie-talkie already pressed to his mouth. Behind him, twelve members of my elite strike crew—the men and women I paid twenty percent above market rate precisely because they could build a botanical fantasy in the middle of a blizzard if I asked them to—poured out of the crew vans that had followed in the rear.
"Tailgates down!" Travis’s voice echoed across the courtyard, amplified by the bullhorn he kept behind the driver’s seat. "Team Alpha, you take the slate-blue velvets directly to the ballroom! Team Beta, floral columns and ceremony arch to the South Lawn immediately! Team Gamma, linens and tabletop settings—you have twenty-five minutes to dress eighteen tables or nobody drinks the top-shelf scotch tonight! MOVE, MOVE, MOVE!"
The precision that followed was nothing short of military art.
Down in the conservatory, ninety-four guests were sipping vintage champagne and eating prosciutto-wrapped figs, completely oblivious to the fact that thirty yards away, twenty-four human beings were performing open-heart surgery on my wedding.
I didn't stay on the balcony. I kicked off my satin bridal heels, grabbed a pair of flat leather slip-ons from my overnight bag, unhooked the long silk train of my dress, and hitched the skirt up with heavy-duty safety pins I kept in my emergency kit.
"Gloria, what are you doing?" Becca gasped as I marched toward the door. "You’re the bride! You can't go down there!"
"I am the bride at 4:45," I said, wrenching the door open. "Right now, I am the Creative Director of Larkspur & Co., and nobody places my Larkspur Delphiniums except me."
When I hit the ballroom floor, it was already a hive of controlled chaos. The silence of the empty hall had been replaced by the rhythmic thump of rubber wheels, the rustle of plastic protective sheeting being torn away, and the sweet, heavy fragrance of crushed eucalyptus, garden roses, and damp moss flooding back into the space where it belonged.
"Table four is missing its centerpiece runner!" someone shouted.
"It's in truck two, bottom bay, under the charger crates!" I shouted back, stepping onto the floor with authority.
The entire crew stopped for half a second, turning to look at me in my hitched-up, multi-thousand-dollar wedding gown with a walkie-talkie strapped to my hip. A collective grin broke out across Travis’s soot-streaked face.
"You heard the boss!" Travis roared. "Bottom bay! Let’s go!"
I moved through the space like a phantom of logistics. I knew every inch of this floor plan. I had drawn it in CAD software nine months ago. I knew that Table 7 needed precisely twenty-four inches of clearance from the service pantry. I knew that the sweetheart table had to be angled at thirty-five degrees to catch the setting sun through the western arched windows. I knew that the cake—the four-tier lemon-and-elderflower masterpiece that had survived two trips across county lines—needed to be placed away from the heating vents.
"Gloria!"
I turned. Standing in the service doorway, his face pale and his hair disheveled, was my father.
Richard Mercer looked like a man whose world had cracked open and revealed the rot beneath the foundation. He was wearing his custom charcoal tuxedo, the one I had paid for three months ago, but his tie was crooked and his boutonnière was missing. He looked around the ballroom, watching twelve people violently reconstruct the wedding he had helped dismantle five hours earlier.
"Gloria," he said again, taking a hesitant step forward, his hands raised in a placating gesture. "Sweetheart. Please."
I didn't stop arranging the silver flatware on Table 3. "You have thirty seconds to explain why you are in my service corridor, Richard."
He flinched. I had never called him Richard in my life. It had always been *Daddy*, then *Dad*. Hearing his Christian name from his oldest daughter’s mouth struck him like a physical blow.
"Your mother... she told me you were doing this out of the goodness of your heart," he stammered, his eyes darting frantically toward the crew members who were intentionally ignoring him while slamming heavy oak tables into place. "She told me you called her this morning and said that because Colette’s engagement was so sudden, and because the Bennett family was so critical to our family’s standing, you were happy to use the Larkspur warehouse stock to help her out!"
I stopped. I set down the heavy silver salad fork with a quiet, terrifying *clink* against the slate-blue cloth. I turned and walked toward him until I was standing less than a foot away.
"Did you call me?" I asked.
He swallowed hard. "Gloria, you know how busy—"
"Did you pick up your phone, press my name, and ask me if I had given away my wedding day?"
"I... I trusted your mother," he whispered, looking down at his polished leather shoes.
"No," I said, my voice slicing through the noise of the room like a scalpel. "You didn't trust her, Richard. You took the path of least resistance. You knew that if you questioned Eleanor, she would scream at you for three days. You knew that if Colette didn't get what she wanted, she would throw tantrums until your house was unlivable. So you sacrificed me. Again. You let them steal my cake, my flowers, my tables, and my dignity, because you thought Gloria is strong. Gloria can take it. Gloria won't make a scene."
"That’s not true!"
"Look at this room!" I hissed, gesturing violently around us. "This is sixty-two thousand dollars of my money! This is seven years of my relationship with Nolan! And you let two moving vans back up to this venue at six o'clock this morning without even asking if your firstborn child was okay with getting married on a bare concrete floor!"
"We were going to make it up to you!" he pleaded, his voice breaking. "We were going to pay for another wedding in the spring! Colette’s fiancé—Julian Bennett—his father owns half the real estate development board! Do you know what that could do for my brokerage firm? Do you know what kind of clients Julian could introduce us to?"
A cold, bitter laugh escaped my throat. "And there it is. The truth. It wasn't about Colette’s happiness at all, was it? It was about your brokerage. It was about Eleanor’s desperate, pathetic climb up the social ladder of a town that doesn't even like her."
"Gloria, please," he said, reaching out to touch my arm. "Come back to your senses. Your sister is devastated over at Ivywood. The Bennetts are going to arrive in forty minutes and there is nothing there! Nothing! Just empty white walls! Can't you spare half the flowers? Just the floral arch? We can take the arch back in my SUV!"
Before I could answer, a heavy hand descended on my father’s shoulder.
It wasn't Travis. It was Nolan.
Nolan didn't yell. He didn't swear. He leaned in close to my father’s ear, his voice deadly quiet, vibrating with an ancient, protective rage.
"Mr. Mercer," Nolan said, "if you touch that floral arch, or if you speak one more word to my wife about her sister's party, I will have Deputy Vance arrest you for criminal conspiracy to commit grand theft right in front of all one hundred and seventy-eight of our guests. Do you understand me?"
Richard looked at Nolan’s eyes and saw zero hesitation. He took a staggering step backward, his face turning an ash-gray color.
"You're making a mistake, Gloria," Richard whispered, his voice trembling with a mixture of shame and petty anger. "The Bennetts have power. Real power. If you humiliate them today, they will ruin Larkspur. They will make sure you never get another luxury contract in this state."
"Let them try," I said. "Now get out of my ballroom."
My father turned and fled through the service doors, his polished shoes squeaking against the tile.
I stood there for three seconds, chest heaving, the adrenaline burning behind my eyes. Nolan wrapped an arm around my waist, pulling me tight against his ribs.
"Forty minutes," he whispered against my hair. "Can we do it?"
I looked around the room. The slate-blue chairs were falling into straight, flawless lines. The crystal glassware was catching the late sun. The four-tier cake was standing proud on its marble plinth, and out on the South Lawn, I could see Travis hoisting the towering arch of white hydrangeas, garden roses, and deep-blue larkspur against the backdrop of the ancient oak trees.
"We don't need forty minutes," I said, wiping a single speck of dust from my bodice. "We need twenty-five. Go get your best man, Nolan. I’m getting married today."
Just as Nolan turned to leave, my phone buzzed on the linen table. It was an unknown number with an Ivywood area code.
I picked it up. "Gloria Mercer."
"Is this the Gloria Mercer who owns Larkspur & Co.?" a deep, cultured, and thoroughly furious male voice asked.
"It is. Who is this?"
May you like
"My name is Julian Bennett," the voice said. "And I would like to know why there are two sheriff's cruisers sitting in my family's private club parking lot, why my fiancée is locked in a bathroom screaming that you stole her decorations, and why your mother is currently telling my mother that you are mentally unstable."
***
