“Good afternoon, Orion,” Everett said as he sat down. “I was just downstairs with your fiancé. She really is upset about all of this.”
Orion grunted and lifted his phone. “She just sent me a load of gibberish telling me the wedding is off. I guess that’s all I need to know. I mean, there’s a lot the public doesn’t understand about little-miss-perfect, Ursula Pennington.”
Little miss perfect? Ha.
“I’m sure that’s true,” Everett agreed, keeping his voice flat and diplomatic. “I’m sure the world will never really understand your relationship.”
“No way. It’s so complicated. We’re different, Ursula and me, but we’re also the same in so many ways. It’s why I don’t even know if I want to fight her on this decision. If she wants out, she wants out. I have to let her fly.”
Orion knocked back the rest of his whiskey and then shuddered. A tear fell from the corner of his left eye. “I just don’t know what I’m going to do without her, you know? We’ve been together for almost two years. It feels like a lifetime.”
Everett imagined saying this to Charlotte later. The kid thinks two years together is a lifetime. Wait till he figures out what a lifetime actually means!
“I understand that,” Everett said, nodding. “Is there any chance—just off-hand—that you might have, I don’t know, cheated on her?”
Orion’s eyes nearly popped out of his head. “What?”
“I mean, on your bachelor weekend. Ursula seems to think something might have happened. Maybe this is part of the reason she’s getting cold feet?”
Orion burst up from his chair and marched his seven-foot-tall body over to the drink table. As he poured another glass of whiskey for himself, he barked at his friend near the window. “Baxter. Did anything happen in Malibu? Anything I might have done or said?”
“No way, man. You told us all how much you loved Ursula. Way too many times, actually,” Baxter said. His voice was bored, and his eyes didn’t leave his phone as he said it. But it was proof enough for Orion.
“See? I swear, that girl drives me crazy, but I want to marry her. Still, I’m not an idiot enough to run after her. If she wants to end it, then it’s over. Here we are, in the middle of literally nowhere...” He stretched his hand out toward the snow-capped Martha’s Vineyard out the window. “And the girl of my dreams tells me she never wants to see me again. I’m man enough to admit that there’s no going back.”
Everett tilted his head. He had to find a way to butter this guy up. Obviously, he and Charlotte had these two crazy, ego-driven celebrities in front of them, and they had to convince them both to do what they actually wanted to do—get married—to ensure that their careers could continue to flourish.
It shouldn’t have been this hard.
“Do you believe in second chances?” Everett asked spontaneously.
Orion looked as though he had never been asked a question like that before. He took several moments to contemplate his answer.
“I think I do,” he said finally. “But only if the person is really perfect for you. Only if you’re okay with making the same mistakes, over and over again.”
“But what if you don’t make those mistakes? It’s a little like playing a video game, right? You play the first round, and then you die somehow. The next time you play, you know to avoid that pitfall, and you keep going. You find a new kingdom or a better route or...” Everett shrugged.
Orion seemed in-tune with this idea. “That’s such a good analogy.”
“Agreed,” his friend by the window called out, his eyes still on his phone.
“Have you ever fought for anything as hard as that?” Orion asked Everett.
Everett hadn’t expected the big-time sports star to ask him a question in return.
“Honestly? No,” Everett stated.
“I see. So you’re spouting a lot of logic that you don’t know anything about,” Orion said.
Everett laughed. “I guess I am.”
“Then why should I believe you?”
“I don’t know. Maybe you shouldn’t,” Everett said, shrugging his shoulders before he continued. “I do think that, if I ever found something worthy enough to fight for, I would do all I could to keep it. At least, I have to believe that about myself.”
Orion considered this. “Do you think I’ll regret marrying her?”
“I think you’ll regret never knowing what would happen after you walked down the aisle and said those vows,” Everett said.
Orion looked confused. He poured a second glass of whiskey and passed it over to Everett, who thanked him. Orion finally collapsed back in his chair and leaned forward. Outside, the snow continued to fall from the sky.
“I don’t know. I don’t want to seem pathetic,” Orion confessed.
“How many things do we do in this life, just so people don’t think we’re lame or dumb or pathetic?” Everett asked, arching an eyebrow.
“I’m in the public eye, dude,” Orion stated. “Everyone looks at me and talks about what I’m doing. A million tweets will be sent about what happens today, probably more. It’s enough to make my brain break.”
“Okay. You’re right. I can’t ever really put myself in your shoes,” Everett said.
Orion made heavy eye contact with him for a long moment. “I appreciate you trying, though, man. Really. I do. It’s a rare thing in this world.”
Chapter Twenty
The guests began to arrive for pre-wedding drinks around three in the afternoon. As far as Charlotte knew, Ursula remained in her suite, drinking bubbly champagne and crying to her mother about “the state of the world” and “how hard it was to be a celebrity.” Naturally, Charlotte couldn’t poke any holes into those arguments. She imagined it was rather difficult. Still, it annoyed her that this was meant to be her big break, she had dragged all her family members into this mess, and now they stood, almost all of them, in a big and beautifully decorated ballroom, wondering what was supposed to happen next.
Lola appeared beside her and arched her brow. “So Christine says she was just standing on the Joseph Sylvia Beach? Looking at the water?”
“In her wedding dress,” Charlotte affirmed. “Yep.”
“Is she out of her mind?”
“I think so,” Charlotte said, giving her cousin a nod.
“That’s too bad.” Lola waved a hand toward the bartender on the far end of the ballroom, then put two fingers up. After a pause, there was a pop of a champagne bottle and the sound of glasses being filled. “Well, while she stews over her decisions, I guess that leaves the rest of us time to drink up,” she said.
Charlotte laughed. “I wanted to be clear-headed for the ceremony and the party, but what the heck? Who knows what will happen next.”
When the bartender arrived with their drinks, almost everyone else—Claire, Amanda, Susan, Scott, Tommy, Zach, and Christine—demanded their own glasses. The bartender hustled back and returned with a number of champagne bottles.
When everyone had a drink in-hand, and Audrey had a little glass of bubbly water, Charlotte lifted her glass toward them.
“I want to thank all of you for your help over the past few weeks. I couldn’t have done it without you. I don’t know what will happen in the next few hours, but I guess, beyond anything, we can get drunk.”
Everyone laughed and cheered and drank down their first of probably many glasses. At that moment, the doors burst open, and the sound of clicking cameras out near the curb filled the air.
“They’ve arrived,” Christine said ominously.
And so they had.
Charlotte had never been particularly fascinated with the idea of being famous. In her mind, some of the best parts of being alive happened outside the allure of the camera. They were the in-betweens: Jason, delivering her a morning cup of coffee and a soft kiss on the forehead, for example, or Rachel, scratching her back when she couldn’t quite reach.
As the celebrities, the same from last night and several more who had o
nly just arrived on the island that afternoon, poured into the ballroom, they feasted on the view of the immaculate ballroom with eyes that seemed to know, already, how many Instagram likes this kind of party would get them. They posed with one another near the Christmas trees, puffing out their lips for each photo and sucking in their tummies. Charlotte eyed Rachel for a second, praying that watching these girls perform like this wouldn’t change her own opinion about her body. She was beautiful, just the way she was, and always would be.
In the midst of the sea of celebrities, friends, and family of the bride and groom, Everett appeared. He wore this goofy grin that was no less attractive than his normal one, and he lifted his camera to snap several photos of the Sheridan and Montgomery clan as he approached.
“Look at you guys. You’re hardly working at all,” he teased.
“Not much to do,” Christine said. “Zach’s hard at work on the meal, but the rest of us are lying in wait to see if there’s going to be a wedding at all.”
Everett peered out at the crowd. “There’s going to be something. I don’t know if it’ll be a wedding. But it’ll be something.”
“How did it go with Orion?” Charlotte asked.
“He poured me a drink of whiskey,” Everett said with a laugh. “And me and the boys from the basketball team had a few really heartfelt conversations about life. To be honest with you, it was one of the stranger afternoons of my life.”
“I’m right there with you on that one,” Charlotte replied.
“Have you seen Ursula?” Everett asked.
The words basically summoned her.
Suddenly, Ursula herself, this gorgeous creature in a wedding gown with such fine beaded detail that it had taken the designer several months of his life to create, appeared in the doorway of the ballroom. Her hair was whipped around, a bit wild from her stint on the beach, but it looked as though someone—probably her mother—had touched up her hair and make-up as much as possible.
As Ursula was the most famous one of all of them, the people in the ballroom turned toward her and cheered. Ursula didn’t give them any kind of smile. She looked on the verge of collapsing.
Instead, she reached out to grab a completely full champagne bottle from a tray of a passing server. The server blinked at her, in shock, but stepped away quickly as Ursula lifted the champagne bottle in the air. She looked a lot like Mel Gibson in Braveheart, Charlotte thought. Ready to lead the charge.
“I have an announcement to make!” Ursula cried out to the crowd before her.
Nobody spoke. Charlotte’s stomach clenched.
“The wedding is off!” Ursula finished, before knocking her head back and drinking the champagne straight from the bottle. Again, silence filled the room until she finished and swallowed. “But that doesn’t mean we can’t party!” she continued.
At this, every single person—including the Sheridan and Montgomery clan—roared.
“Wooo!” Audrey cried, wrapping her hand around her mouth to make it louder.
Charlotte burst into laughter. Tears fell down her cheeks. What the heck? After all she had been through? It had come to this? Beside her, Everett continued to take as many photos as possible. When she turned toward him, she said, “What’s the use? It’s not like Wedding Today will feature the photos, right? I mean, the wedding is off.”
Everett shook his head, his smile widening. “Actually, Charlotte, I think Wedding Today will happily take these photos. This wedding? It’s going to go down in history. It’ll make the magazine sell millions of copies. And you? You’ll be known as the wedding planner behind it. I mean, look at what you did here. This ballroom, that dining hall over across the way? The décor is brilliant. The wedding would have been wonderful. And you did your job brilliantly!”
“But nobody will ever see it,” Charlotte said, feeling foolish about her own sadness.
Everett shrugged. “You know that nothing is quite as good as we build it up in our heads to be.”
Charlotte didn’t know whether to laugh or cry now. She shook with emotion, but still wore a huge smile. She thought back to her own wedding to Jason—how she had built it up so much, but it had actually just been a tiny affair, a gathering of friends and family. She thought back to every staged moment, the things they had photographed, the holidays they had shared. None of it had been exactly what she had ever planned for. And in that fact, she’d had a life to be grateful for.
“All right, team,” Charlotte said, whipping around to grin at her family. “You heard the lady. Let’s party!”
Chapter Twenty-One
The party took on a new dimension after Ursula’s announcement.
Charlotte hadn’t seen anything like it, not in all her years of party-planning, or even when she had visited girlfriends off the island at various college parties. The booze flowed; the gorgeous people fought and danced and laughed; Zach put out appetizer round after appetizer round and managed to only get into a few little spats with his servers.
“That’s the most incredible part of all of this,” Christine said to Charlotte in the corridor, after they had both fixed their lipstick in the bathroom. “Zach? Not fighting that much? I mean, the man is a hothead.”
Charlotte laughed.
“Ah, but I love him. So much. I hope when we finally get married; he lets someone else do the cooking, though,” Christine continued. “I don’t know if he trusts anyone else.”
Dinner was served in the dining hall. Charlotte stuffed another chair at the family table to allow for Everett to sit with them, and the two of them got lost in banter and good wine as the courses flowed out of the kitchen. Occasionally, Charlotte turned her eyes toward Ursula, who sat with her best friends, still in her wedding dress, and laughed and gossiped as if this was just any other day. What went through her head? Did she regret calling it all off?
But the air in the room didn’t reek of regret. It was cinnamon, simmering with smells of roasted pork, potatoes, all the fixings, including croissants and pies. Christine asked if she should pull out the wedding cake, just to be featured, and Charlotte said, “Sure. What the heck! You created such a beautiful masterpiece. Let’s not let it go to waste.” When the cake was wheeled out, Ursula posed near it as a joke, and everyone laughed and snapped multiple photos. Charlotte heard more than one person ask who had made the cake. At this, she walked up and slipped one of Christine’s cards into their hands. Christine deserved all the fame in the world.
Sometime around nine that evening, Charlotte found Everett near the coatroom. Her heart lurched as she asked, “You aren’t going, are you?”
“No. Not at all. I can’t miss the rest of whatever this is,” he said with a big smile. “I just wanted to get some air. It looks like it started snowing again.”
Charlotte watched as Everett slipped on that massive coat, the one that had belonged to her Uncle Wes. “You really do look like you belong here,” she told him. “No longer that west coast guy who arrived only days ago.”
“Funny how things change,” he said with a laugh as he looked down at his boots.
Charlotte grabbed her coat and headed out onto the porch with Everett. The snow fell softly, lit only by the moon. It was such a beautiful night.
“I wonder what will happen next in their lives,” Everett said.
“I don’t know. They’re still young. They have everything ahead of them,” Charlotte said.
“I wonder if they ever really loved each other,” Everett said. “Or if it was all a lie, they told themselves.”
Charlotte shivered. “I think love is a beautiful answer to something. I don’t know what the question is, exactly, but...” She trailed off and then forced herself to say, “I was married for about twenty years. My husband passed away last year in a fishing accident. For a long time, I thought I wouldn’t live through it. I woke up every day in that bed alone and I thought—what’s the point?”
As she said the words, Charlotte realized that she hadn’t explained her situation to anyone s
ince it had happened. Everyone in her life had either known about it or not gotten close enough to her to find out.
“I don’t know why I’m telling you this,” Charlotte said, suddenly feeling a bit embarrassed about sharing too much. He hadn’t even asked her about her situation, so why did she tell him that?
“I want to know this stuff,” Everett said softly as he turned to look at her.
Charlotte’s heart grew warm. She was reminded of that Grinch, whose heart outgrew his chest.
“You don’t have to,” Charlotte said. “I know this isn’t your life. You’re just a visitor. But...”
Everett shrugged. “But isn’t it nice to be seen?”
Charlotte nodded as she looked at him.
But before she could answer, someone near the far end of the porch called her name.
Charlotte and Everett turned quickly to find Orion and Ursula.
Ursula was still dressed in her wedding dress; Orion had donned his tux.
They stood awkwardly, like young adults who had just been caught doing something wrong.
“Everett,” Orion said in greeting.
“Orion,” Everett nodded. “Hello, Ursula.”
Ursula turned her eyes toward Charlotte. They glowed beautifully. “Charlotte, we’ve had a long conversation about today.”
Finally.
“And we want to get married after all,” Orion confessed.
What?
“But we don’t want to do it in front of all those people,” Ursula said. “I hardly even know most of them. O and I are almost always in the spotlight. It’s our instinct to be in front of people. But what if that isn’t the best way? What if the only way to step forward in marriage is to be by ourselves?”
Charlotte could hardly believe what she’d just heard.
Beside Ursula, Orion gave a firm nod. “Maybe you know somewhere we could go? A little church, or...”
“There’s a little chapel,” Charlotte said. “It’s not far.”
“A chapel. How quaint,” Ursula said.
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