The Wedding Planner. Eve Devon
us the date,’ Crispin pressed, folding his arms.
‘Yes, when’s the big day?’ Carole Jones piped up, probably hoping to get darling-daughter, Arabella, cast as a flower girl.
‘Look, they haven’t decided yet, okay?’ Gloria ground out.
‘Of course they have, they’ve gathered the wedding party,’ Trudie McTravers insisted. ‘You don’t gather the wedding party until you’ve decided on the date, everyone knows that.’
‘Come on, Gloria, dish the date,’ Ted’s wife said. ‘If I don’t get home soon, I’m going to miss the season finale of Merriweather Mysteries.’ Turning back to Crispin she said, ‘I don’t know why you scheduled the meeting for tonight, Crispin.’
‘Catch-up TV, maybe you’ve heard of it?’ Crispin replied.
‘Yes, but then I can’t tweet along during it and I have to turn off all my notifications so I don’t get spoilers before I get to see it.’
‘What’s to tweet? The most famous person is always the murderer,’ Gloria murmured and then reminded herself that the longer they were talking about this, the less time to talk about the other thing.
‘I wouldn’t have pegged you for a Merriweather Mysteries fan,’ Janet, one of the beauticians at the spa told Ted’s wife. ‘What do you think of the second series?’
‘It’s taken a bit of a delicious darker Dr Foster-esque turn, hasn’t it? Have you heard who they’re lining up for series three?’
‘Damn it, Janet,’ Crispin moaned, seemingly bemused at why people were now asking if Trudie could look into the next Whispers Wood production being The Rocky Horror Show. ‘Please everyone, we don’t have time for this. We need the wedding date so we can progress the beer festival. It’s in Emma and Jake’s best interests anyway. I can’t imagine their distress if it’s accidentally double-booked and residents have to decide whether to support them or the village.’
Frustrated and feeling the bilious-inducing green walls closing in, all Gloria could do was look around the room helplessly and repeat, ‘Come on, you can’t seriously imagine the whole of Whispers Wood is invited?’
‘Of course we’re invited. It’ll be up at the Hall, won’t it?’ Trudie insisted. ‘We’ll all get the chance to see the gardens and Cheryl’s probably going to be asked to provide some of her prize-winning dahlias for the arrangements. Who won’t want to see and support that?’
At this new barrage of wedding-date harassment all Gloria could think was if she didn’t shut this down, they’d be egging each other on from now until the Doomsday Clock hit midnight.
‘All right, all right,’ she shouted. ‘You want a date? You want me to, like, give you their actual booked and completely planned wedding date?’
The room erupted into one great big fat affirmative.
As her thought process leapfrogged all over her brain in panic she suddenly found herself opening her mouth and saying, ‘Fourth of October.’
Wait—What the what?
The fourth of October?
As in her wedding anniversary, the fourth of October?
No.
No, no, no, no, no.
Blood pounded in her ears.
Her heart felt tachycardic and she gripped the edge of the bar as the ground shifted under her.
Treading on Toes, Financial Woes and Post-Divorce Goals
Seth
Seth Knightley stepped out of the shower, wrapped a towel around his waist, and automatically took a step back as he lifted the bathroom door gently to aid opening it.
He’d only needed one close encounter with the ‘slicing zone’, the first morning he’d moved back into his childhood home, for his toes to remember the danger.
Muscle memory was weird, he thought, remembering how at sixteen, after the family dog had sadly departed this world, it had taken him months to stop taking that extra-wide step every time he got up off the sofa so that he didn’t accidentally step on his old faithful friend, Digger.
He eased a hand across the old familiar ache in his heart. He hadn’t thought about Digger in years.
Probably something about this place because speaking of weird, a few months living back at Knightley Hall and all he’d done was think.
About things.
All the things.
Okay, let’s get real. This place might provide the perfect ruminating ambiance but it was signing the divorce papers that had brought about that perfect trifecta of cogitation also known as: thinking about the past, present and future.
A necessary but hard task since all the work he’d put in over the years to deliberately shut-down philosophising on life’s hard questions.
Life was too short and at twenty Seth had learned the hard truth – that sometimes there were no reasons for what went down. You just had to look forward and get through, collecting as little shrapnel as possible.
The approach had served him well until at twenty-eight, finding himself at the end of something that hadn’t worked right from the beginning … probably because of too little thinking on his part, he’d been forced to conclude that going forward it might help to find out where he stood on the really big things.
Escaping the cloud of steam from the bathroom, he headed back to his room, bumping straight into his brother, Jake, in the hallway.
‘Going somewhere?’ Jake asked.
Seth shoved hair that was not quite as long and was shades lighter than his brother’s raven-coloured-brooding-Poldark-look back from his face and considered his answer.
Actually he had two places to be – the first place on account of now knowing where he stood on the really big things and the second place … yeah … there was no way it needed to get out how he made his living these days.
He had time before he needed to be at either though and contributing free labour around the place was, for the time being, the only way Seth could help out.
‘You want me to drive that framework for the courtyard garden over to The Clock House?’ he asked. It had been hard, sweaty work loading the iron fret-work Jake had designed onto one of Oscar’s flat-bed trucks so that it could be installed in the courtyard garden of the clock house later that week. Seth knew Jake was miffed about the project being badly delayed but he really hoped his brother wasn’t heading down there this afternoon to get a head-start on the installation. He’d been counting on Jake working in the gardens here, so that he could go to the clock house himself. He had a desk booked at Hive @ The Clock House and it was going to be hard enough to avoid all the curious looks, without Jake wading in with blunt questions as to what he was doing.
‘No need, I’ll do it tomorrow,’ Jake answered. ‘So have you got a job interview or something, then?’
Irritation wormed its way under Seth’s usual happy-go-lucky demeanour. That particular question came out of his brother’s mouth more often than the summer’s hit was played on the radio and played in his ear like the worst kind of ear-worm. If he had his way he’d be working here at Knightley Hall, not necessarily drawing a salary yet, but definitely recognised as part of the team.
But in order to be part of the team what he really needed to do was nail the presentation he was working