"Nine days," Ana said, "is not a wedding. Nine days is a hostage situation with canapés."
Dominic didn't look up from his phone. They were in the back of his car, which was long and black and smelled like leather and nothing else. No gum wrappers. No coffee cup. No sign that a human being had ever eaten anything in here.
"You've done it in less," he said.
"I did a vow renewal in six days once. They'd already been married for forty years. Nobody was checking the flowers."
"Four hundred people will be checking the flowers."
"Four hundred." She opened the spreadsheet on her own phone. Its tabs were colour-coded. One of them was called CONTINGENCY and was already longer than the others. "Do you know any of them?"
"About thirty."
"Do you like any of them?"
He considered that with real seriousness, which she would learn was how he considered everything. "Four," he said. "Five if my grandmother's dog counts."
"There is a dog. I knew there was a dog."
Finally he looked at her. "There's no dog in the contract."
"There's a dog-shaped hole in the contract. Page eighty-eight."
He made a short exhale through the nose that, in another man, might have been a laugh, and turned back to his phone, but she saw the corner of his mouth again. She was starting to keep a tally of that corner. She told herself it was professional interest.
She planned the wedding the way she planned every wedding. Ruthlessly. At two in the morning. With her laptop on a pillow and three alarms set for the florist.
There were things she wasn't allowed to choose. The venue was the roof of the Hartley Meridian, because a Hartley had married on that roof every generation since the hotel opened. The cake was the Meridian's own pastry kitchen, a five-tier thing with sugar magnolias that looked like it had been designed by a committee of swans. The guest list came from Dominic's assistant, a terrifying young man named Felix who answered every email in under four minutes.
The dress, though. The dress she chose.
"It's very plain," said her brother Mateo, nineteen and leaning on the bakery counter, when she showed him the photo. He had frosting on his elbow. He always had frosting somewhere.
"It's silk."
"It's a slip. You're going to marry a billionaire in a nightgown."
"It's a bias-cut slip dress, and he's not technically a billionaire until the will clears."
"Oh, well then." Mateo licked the frosting off his elbow. "Papi still thinks you won a work contest."
"I did win a work contest."
"Ana."
She turned the oven timer around so she wouldn't have to look at him. The old oven ticked behind her as it heated, a sound like a cooling engine, like something counting down. "He doesn't need to know yet. He needs to know the rent's paid. That's all."
Mateo was quiet. Then he said, "Do you at least like him?"
"Clause nine," she said. "I'm contractually prohibited."
"That's not a no."
"Go pipe something."
On the ninth day, the sun went down over the river in long bars of honey and copper, and Ana stood at the end of an aisle she had designed herself, between four hundred strangers in folding chairs she had personally counted twice.
She had chosen everything about this moment except the man at the end of it.
He was waiting under the arch of white roses. Dark suit, three pieces, his grandfather's watch. When the quartet shifted into the processional, he turned to watch her come, and something happened to his face that she had not put in any spreadsheet.
The arctic thing went out of it entirely. He had the look of someone who had been told what was coming and still had not been ready for it.
She walked anyway. She was a professional.
The registrar was a small woman with reading glasses on a chain. She asked Dominic if he took this woman, and he said "I do" in a low, steady voice, as if he were confirming a figure.
Then the registrar turned to her.
Ana had heard four hundred brides say it. She knew where the pause went, how long to hold it, which side to tilt the head for the photographer. She opened her mouth to do all of it perfectly.
"I do," said a voice she barely recognised. It came out softer than she meant, and braver, like it belonged to some other woman who had walked up the aisle in her place.
Dominic's hand tightened, once, around hers.
"You may kiss the bride."
They had rehearsed this. Three seconds, closed mouths, his hand on her waist and hers on his lapel, angled toward the photographer on the left. Felix had timed it with a stopwatch.
Dominic bent his head. His mouth touched hers, careful and warm, and she counted. One. Two.
On three, he didn't move away.
On four, she didn't either.
On five, somebody's aunt started clapping, and the whole roof followed, and Ana stepped back with her face burning and her lipstick undoubtedly ruined and the clear, cold knowledge that she had just planned and executed a disaster.
The reception spilled across the roof in strings of light. She did what she always did at weddings. She checked the bar levels, she redirected a waiter, she caught a toddler about to eat a candle. She drank exactly one glass of champagne and held a second for the photos.
It was Mateo, in a borrowed suit, who found her by the parapet.
"That was not three seconds," he said.
"Go away."
"I counted. I'm very good at counting. I've been portioning dough since I was six."
"Mateo."
He kissed her cheek and went away grinning, and that was when a hand with three diamond rings and a grip like a falcon closed around her wrist.
Celeste Hartley was eighty-one and wore pearls the size of grapes. Ana had read about her. Widow of Augustus Hartley, mother of the late Robert Hartley, grandmother of the groom, and owner of a small fierce terrier named Admiral, who was at this moment asleep in a quilted handbag under the head table.
"Mrs. Hartley," Ana said. "Thank you for coming."
"I live downstairs, dear. It would have been rude not to." The old woman's eyes, the same light grey as her grandson's, moved over Ana's face, the plain silk dress, the champagne. "You are not what I ordered."
Ana's smile held, barely. "I'm sorry to disappoint you."
"I didn't say that." Celeste patted her hand, twice, briskly, like a woman testing bread. "You may be considerably better." Then she leaned closer, and the scent of violets came with her. "Now. Has my grandson told you about the trustee?"