The Bride (The Boss)

by Barnette, Abigail

  This was exactly like House Hunters.

  I’d heard Tom’s tone before, the self-conscious projection of confidence that the potential buyer would find the property amazing. Neil trying to downplay the fact that he was already writing the check in his head, though it was a totally obvious ploy. Which meant I got to step into the role of the spouse who expressed disappointment and dissatisfaction at everything.

  It was like some dark and terrifying part of my soul had finally been unleashed. “I don’t like wallpaper,” I said in the fourth bathroom we viewed. In the kitchen, I lamented, “Oh…granite countertops are out now, though.” I expressed concerns about light pollution from the patio area and infinity pool. I wondered if it would be too far a walk for me from the garage to the bedroom, or if the bathrooms had enough natural light. I think for a minute I actually turned into the weird neighbor lady from the Hermés disaster.

  If the helicopter crashed and we died on the way back to the city, I would die with my life’s ambition fulfilled. I could not wait to tell Holli.

  We left Tom with a “we’ll let you know” when he drove us back to the waiting helicopter. As we strapped in, Neil gave me a wry glance and said, “I hope that’s out of your system now.”

  I beamed at him.

  When we lifted off, I looked down at the house. The sprawling grounds had a pond and various outbuildings, including an eccentric copy of the Pavilion Français at Versailles. Tom had shown us photos, so we didn’t have to brave the cold again, but I could pick out a few of the buildings now, darker spots against the green-black of the grass and trees. There was a guesthouse Tom had referred to as a “mother-in-law residence,” which had made Neil freeze like he’d just been shot. In no way did I want my mother to come live with us, but it was too funny not to let him panic over the idea.

  “What do you think?” Neil asked. His fingers laced through and locked with mine as he pointedly avoided looking out the window.

  “I think…” I sat back and leaned my head on his shoulder. “I think we’re going to be very happy here.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Though it was surprisingly difficult to return to real life once we’d put in our offer on the house, there was really nothing left for us to do. After the first two days of jumping every time the phone rang, I had to get out.

  Luckily, with the wedding locked down under Valerie’s obsessive attention to detail, Emma had turned her event-planning anxiety to a more pressing date: Neil’s fiftieth birthday party.

  She met me for lunch at Hangawi, a midtown Korean vegetarian restaurant where you took off your shoes at the door and sat at booths with sunken floors beneath the low tables. I arrived ten minutes late, to a very familiar expression.

  “You know, if we’re going to pull off a surprise party, you will need to be on time,” Emma said with an arched brow.

  “I know, I know.” I took a seat on the cushion on the floor and slid my legs under the table. “But you know, if I’m supposed to actually get your father to the party on time, I won’t technically be late. Since the party can’t officially start without him.”

  Her pursed lips told me off more effectively than she ever could have with words.

  “So, what have you got?” I leaned my elbows on the table and folded my hands beneath my chin. “I’ve never planned anyone’s gigantic birthday party.”

  “Good! Then I can do it all.” She rummaged in her Kate Spade bag for her iPad.

  “You sound awfully excited about that prospect, for someone who’s getting married in five months.” I shrugged out of my coat, and the passing hostess stopped to take it.

  Emma rolled her eyes as she tapped the screen. “Oh, am I getting married? Because you wouldn’t know it, to talk to her.”

  “She just wants everything to be perfect.” It was no use defending Valerie. I knew well enough how contentious the relationship could be between a daughter and her single mother. When my wedding was approaching, my mom would probably be just as bad.

  I hoped she would be just as bad. It hadn’t occurred to me before, but she might not want to have anything to do with my wedding. She was super mad about my relationship with Neil, and I hadn’t spoken to her since the phone call where I’d broken the news of our engagement.

  Suddenly, grilled todok didn’t sound as appetizing as it had in the car on the way over.

  “Sophie, are you okay? You’ve gone quite pale.” She squinted at me over the top of her iPad.

  I waved a hand. “It’s fine. I was just thinking about your problem.”

  “Honestly, the woman acts as though it isn’t my job to orchestrate full-scale events for a massive not-for-profit organization.” She turned the tablet to face me. “This is where I think we should do it.”

  My heart stuck in my throat. 1 OAK was one of the fabled New York lounges. I’d never been, but Holli had, and she’d said the place had been wall-to-wall celebs at the time. “Isn’t that going to be…um. I don’t think nightclubs are really your father’s scene.”

  “No, and for god’s sake, we don’t want him dancing,” Emma said, and I had the internal American-hearing-an-English-accent squee at the way she pronounced it, “dawncing.” She flicked the screen again and showed me a seating and floor plan. “This is what they came up with. I was thinking we should keep it intimate.”

  I frowned at the circles and lines. “Intimate? This looks like seating for two hundred.”

  “I know. So we will have to be very cautious about who does and does not receive an invitation.” She clucked her tongue and turned the iPad around, frowning. “Do you think we should go with a larger venue?”

  “Emma, the last party I threw was like, twenty people in my apartment. This is…huge.” Sudden panic gripped me. “Do you know who we’re supposed to invite? When we did the party before his transplant, Neil said Valerie knew who to invite. But I don’t have a list or anything. And I really, really don’t want to involve your mother in this.”

  There. I’d said it. I didn’t want Valerie to be in charge of stuff for the party. This was my boyfriend’s fiftieth birthday party, and I wanted to be the one planning it. I didn’t want to make it a joint effort with his ex.

  “Believe me, I don’t want her coming in and taking this over, too. It’s a miracle I got to pick out my own bloody wedding gown,” she said with a weary sigh. “But in this, we might have to make a concession. We’ve only got two months to send out invites.”

  I drummed my fingers on the tabletop. “You know what? Let me figure something out. Give me like, two days.”

  “You have two days. After that, you have to call my mother.”

  Emma was a great party planner, which was fortunate, since I was used to throwing the kind of shindigs where ice was dumped into the sink to store beverages. She had ideas about traffic flow, table decorations, dance floor space, number of servers… No wonder she and her mother had the entire wedding wrapped up. The only thing I could really contribute was a suggestion about the music. We opted for a DJ, rather than a live band, so we could play songs from all five decades of Neil’s life as the evening progressed.

  We were nearly finished making our plans—and eating our lunch—when Emma snapped her fingers. “I almost forgot! If you guys end up moving before the party, you’ll need to make reservations to stay in the city overnight. You won’t want to go all the way back to Sagaponack late at night.”

  “You’re right.” The solution came to me in flash of uncensored inspiration. “Oh my gosh! I’ll get the Wow suite!”

  “Oh, that ugly place Dad was staying after the divorce? Why?” She wrinkled her nose.

  “It was where we had our first date. Or…unofficial first date, I guess?” I waved off the further explanation she wouldn’t want. “It’s a part of our history.”

  A part of our history in which I had waited for him on the sofa, fingering myself, so that when he’d arrived he’d found me with my legs spread and my hand in my panties. I could still vividly hear him
ordering me to take them off, could see him lifting them to his nose and sniffing deeply.

  Okay, I would get the Wow suite for the night after his birthday, since I was sure we’d be drunk as hell after the party.

  “That’s quite sweet,” Emma said, surprising me. She usually turned up her nose at anything having to do with her father and romance. She put her iPad back into her bag. “Okay, so you’ll check on the addresses and come up with a DJ?”

  “Yeah, I’ve got a pretty good idea of what Neil likes, music wise.” I shrugged. “And I can always ‘accidentally’ mix up our phones and check out what’s he’s listening to lately.”

  “Wonderful. I’ll confirm with the venue, and then all that’s left is you getting him to the party. How do you plan to do that?”

  “I thought I could tell him we’re going out for dinner, and you could text me while we’re in the car. Say you’re at the club and you’ve forgotten your wallet. And we’ll have to swing by and pay your tab…” I raised my eyebrows and nodded to gently urge her in my direction.

  She remained unimpressed. “He’s going to see right through that. Tell him Michael forgot his wallet. He’ll be so excited at the chance to rescue me from my fiancé’s incompetence he won’t question it for a moment.”

  “Ooh, good idea,” I agreed. Then I thought of what Valerie and I had talked about the other night. “You know…I think your dad is slowly warming up to Michael. I don’t think they’ll ever be best friends—”

  “Spare me, Sophie,” she said with a weighty eye-roll. “I’m at peace with the fact that my father will never like my husband. At least it will keep family gatherings interesting…”

  She kept talking, but her words were drowned out by the rush of adrenaline-infused blood straight to my brain. A flash of ruby red had caught my eye, a distinctive shade that I hadn’t thought of in months.

  It was Gabriella Winters’s hair color, and she had just passed by my table on the way out of the restaurant.

  “Sophie?” Emma asked, stopping mid-sentence to look at me in alarm. “Are you all right?”

  I turned to follow Gabriella with my eyes; I couldn’t help it. It was like seeing the ghost of someone you didn’t like all that well. But it was so, so much worse than that, because walking with her, laughing loudly at something Gabriella had said, was Deja.

  “No,” I managed to say without choking on my own shock. “No, I’m definitely not all right.”

  * * * *

  Emma rode with me to the Elwood & Stern offices, because I was a nervous wreck.

  “Are you okay?” she asked. “Do you want me to come up with you?”

  I shook my head. “No. Your dad is going to freak. I think I just need to tell him this one-on-one.”

  “Do you want me to wait here with Tony?” she asked, gesturing to the partition between the front and back seats.

  “I’ll get a cab home.” I didn’t know how I was going to be holding up, and I didn’t want Emma to see me fall apart.

  I couldn’t believe Deja would risk her job like this. I couldn’t believe I was in this position.

  If I told Neil, my best friend would be unhappy. If I didn’t tell Neil, the truth might come out eventually. And Emma had seen it. I couldn’t stand for her to think I was disloyal to her father. Our weird stepmother-stepdaughter relationship was built around me walking on eggshells and her being mildly disapproving. If she knew I was hiding something important from her father, even that would be gone.

  One thing I knew for certain was that Holli was going to get hurt. She was an innocent bystander and it wasn’t fair, but there was no way to avoid it. I had to be honest with Neil.

  More importantly, I had to be honest with myself. I wouldn’t feel right, keeping what I’d seen a secret. I’d come to hate the way I felt when I was lying or covering something up. I was growing away from that person, and I didn’t want to invite her back in.

  Telling Neil was as much for my sake as it was for his.

  I hadn’t really thought through the logistics of what would happen once I was in the building. I didn’t know if I needed to be on a list, or call ahead, or what. There were two uniformed guards at the security desk, as well as a man in suit wearing one of those earpieces with the curly cords. It was kind of intimidating.

  “Hi, I need to go up to Elwood and Stern,” I began. I sounded like I wasn’t supposed to be there. I wouldn’t let me in.

  The guy with the earpiece looked pretty skeptical, as well. “Name?”

  “Sophie Scaife,” I told him uncertainly. “I’m probably not on a list or anything. But if you call up—”

  He tapped something into the computer beneath the counter and reached for a laminated pass. “Okay, Ms. Scaife, you’re going to go to the second bank of elevators, and Elwood and Stern is on the eleventh floor.”

  Okay, that was a little bit cool, to just waltz on in like I owned the place. Or, like my fiancé owned the place.

  As I rode the elevators up, I tried to sort through the emotions that were currently nauseating me. The ramped up anxiety, that was a given. The fear that I might have to actually confront Deja one-on-one eventually, I recognized that, too. The anger caught me off guard. I couldn’t remember a time I’d been so frighteningly mad at someone. My heart lodged itself at the base of my throat, and though I was outwardly calm, I had no idea how I was going to react if I saw her.

  The woman behind the desk in the Elwood & Stern lobby saw me coming as soon as I stepped off the elevator. I marched up to her as confidently as I could and said, “I’m here to see—”

  “You’re here to see Mr. Elwood,” she finished for me. “They already called up. Have you been here before? Do you need me to show you the way?”

  “Um…” I looked around. The place was not what I’d been expecting. The walls were a dark gray, with three thin, chrome bands running along them and down the corridors on either side of the reception desk. The carpet was black, and the furniture in the waiting area was black with brushed steel accents. It was surprisingly dark; it must be like working in a submarine all day. “Maybe you should, yeah. Show me the way.”

  “I’m Alice,” the woman introduced herself. Her chestnut hair was pulled up in a neat twist at the back of her head, and she was dressed way more conservatively than I was used to seeing in an office setting—but that was because my last job had been Porteras, where high fashion had ruled. Alice’s light gray pants suit and white silk shell seemed almost dowdy in comparison to the stuff Ivanka, the receptionist at the magazine, had worn.

  Alice bustled me along down the short corridor to the main office. It wasn’t as dark here; though the decor was the same, overhead halogens on exposed tracks took the place of the inset can lighting in the lobby, and cubical walls in slate divided the floor into six large workstations.

  “This is Mr. Elwood’s office.” Alice gestured to the frosted glass doors on the other side of the aisle we walked. “His assistant is at lunch, but you can go right in.”

  “Thank you,” I said as I opened the doors. Beyond what I assumed was the desk that belonged to his assistant, Brent, another set of double doors, these completely transparent, revealed a striking view of the harbor, and a striking view of Neil.

  Dressed in a chocolate brown silk suit with a very subtle sheen, he stood with one arm against the steel beam intersecting the glass wall. He had his cell to his ear, and he was smiling at whatever the caller was saying. I knocked on the door and he turned, then gestured me inside.

  As I slipped in, I heard him say, “Thank you, Rudy,” before hanging up the call. He dropped his phone onto his desk. “I wasn’t expecting a surprise today.”

  “Well, that’s too bad,” I said grimly. “Because I have one, and it isn’t nice.”

  “Oh?” His playful demeanor vanished as he studied my face. “What’s happened?”

  “I was at lunch with Emma,” I began.

  In my moment of slight hesitation, Neil interjected, “She’s pregnant, is
n’t she?”

  My jaw dropped, and I sputtered a moment. “N-no. No, this isn’t about Emma, it’s about—”

  Movement drew my eye to the door. Brent was back, and he gestured to Neil through the door, pointing to his ear.

  “I’m sorry, darling, but I should be on a conference call. I’m supposed to be in Valerie’s office right now—”

  “It has to wait!” I sounded like I was about to cry. I was about to cry.

  Which I assumed was why Neil glanced out at Brent and hit a button on the multi-line phone on his desk. “Terribly sorry, please tell Ms. Stern to go on with the call without me. Please don’t mention my visitor.”

  “Sure thing,” he answered. Brent’s relentless cheerfulness was a trait Neil often complained about at home. It would have been funny to see it in action, if not for my current predicament.

  Neil led me to his chair and parked me in while he half-sat on the corner of his desk. “All right, what’s going on?”

  “I saw Deja. She was in the restaurant with us, I don’t know how long, but I didn’t see her until she was walking out.” My throat went so dry, it actually stuck closed. I swallowed, grimacing at the pain. “She was with Gabriella Winters.”

  “What?” Neil asked, his forehead wrinkling as his eyebrows drew together. “Are you sure?”

  “I would recognize Gabriella anywhere. I’m surprised I didn’t see her the moment I got to the restaurant. So I guess my radar is busted.” My shoulders weighed ten pounds more than they had before I’d stepped into the office. What was all that bullshit about the weight of the world? I’d thought it would lighten some once I’d confessed what I’d seen.