Page 3 of The Wedding Twist

For the past ten years, she’d managed all of the Butterfly Lake Lodge’s operations, from training and scheduling the cleaning staff, ordering supplies, taking bookings, checking in and touring guests, and problem solving the many different curveballs that came along with running their fourteen-room lodge.

Everett and Jeannie were the faces of the inn—Everett as the resident naturalist who created and maintained their award-winning pollinator gardens and grounds and offered astronomy classes, hikes through the woods, and cross-country skiing expeditions, and Jeannie as the chef, baker, and host extraordinaire who made sure stomachs were happy and faces were smiling. Celeste was behind the front desk and otherwise behind the scenes, making sure the lodge maintained its air of effortless calm while ensuring everything ran like clockwork.

“Why do you think they told us all separately? Are they not only selling but closeted masochists as well?” Quinn asked now.

Celeste sighed, then buried her face into her sister’s shoulder. “I don’t think they could take a tsunami of four daughters’ tears all at once. Pass me that bottle.”

Another knock sounded at the door. Celeste and Quinn looked at each other. If it was their mother, she’d have likely been listening outside of the door for the past five minutes. Jeannie was notorious for getting into her girls’ business, from grilling their friends who came to dinner or for a movie night when they’d been growing up to reading the diaries they’d kept stuffed under their mattresses and in their underwear drawers (an accusation which Jeannie still denied) to having an often infuriating but usually appreciated sixth sense for what was going on in the minds and lives of her daughters.

If it was Everett, he’d be there to get a game of euchre going or convince them to go for a late-winter hike in the forest behind the lodge. Everett didn’t like conflict, so smoothing things over with the girls as quickly as possible and pretending everything was okay would likely be top of mind.

The door creaked open slowly, then stopped. Celeste and Quinn burst out laughing as another much larger bottle of Fireball slowly levitated into the room, held up by a phantom hand. It could only be one of two people.

“Elodie!” Celeste cried, and she sat up as the second oldest of the McCarthy sisters appeared in the doorway. “I thought you were away for another week.”

Elodie entered, wearing khakis and a weatherproof down jacket, her long auburn hair pulled back into a ponytail, her big, gold-flecked brown eyes filled with concern. A biology professor at the University of Calgary, Elodie was on sabbatical, researching something about mycorrhizal networks, or what she called in layman’s terms “trees talking to each other.” She’d been using the lodge as her home base in between expeditions to an area in the boreal forest, where she and her team had a base camp.

Elodie spotted the small bottle of Fireball on the bed between Celeste and Quinn and joined in their laughter. “Great minds,” she said and looked around the room. “I was supposed to be gone for another week. But after last night’s call, I figured I might be needed elsewhere.”

“Do Mom and Dad know you’re back?” Quinn said.

“They’ll know soon enough. I slipped in through the mudroom. I figured at least one of you would be up here.”

The turret room had long been the McCarthy sisters’ favorite place to hang out, since it offered the most privacy. It was only ever occupied when the lodge was full. Otherwise if someone booked it, looking for the most affordable option, they would always be surprised with an upgrade to a larger suite, with no additional charge. It had also been a great place for a slumber party in their preteen years despite there only being one bed.

Since it was a Monday evening in late April, a time of year when the lodge was only at capacity on weekends, the turret room was conveniently available for the sisters to commiserate.

Now they were only missing Ava, which wasn’t uncommon. Ava was a single mother of an eight-year-old girl, Sam, and worked a demanding job in downtown Calgary as one of the city’s top investment bankers. In the last few years, Ava and Sam had only been able to make it to the lodge for Christmas, an important family celebration or wedding, or for the odd weekend when Ava’s bosses were themselves on vacation.

“Should we call Ava?” Quinn said and slid her phone out of her pocket. If there was a time they would have loved all being together at the same time, it was now.

“Sure,” Celeste said. “I doubt she’ll answer, though.”

Quinn tapped the phone to connect to their sister on FaceTime, while Elodie tossed her jacket onto one of the camel leather lounge chairs by the fireplace, then plopped down onto the foot of the bed and lay on her back. “Ahh…” she sighed. “A real mattress. Lovely.”

After three rings, Ava’s face came on the screen, features barely visible in a dark room. “Let me guess—you’re all sobbing like babies in the turret room,” she said before any of them could get a word in edgewise.

“Wish you were here,” Elodie said. “If anyone could talk some sense into Mom and Dad, it would be you.”

Ava’s no-nonsense approach to life and willingness to speak her mind sometimes got her into trouble but for the most part served her well, not only in her career but in life. She was also sarcastic and had been a holy terror of a teenager when she’d been at her hormonal peak, so when Sam had been born, the whole family had gleefully proclaimed that Ava was going to get what was coming to her, but so far, her daughter was as angelic as they came, without even a hint of her mother’s fiery temper or dry sarcasm. The whole family doted on Sam, as their only granddaughter and niece.

“Same,” Ava said. “But you know how I feel about the turret room. It’s haunted. Remember that knocking we heard last time we stayed there?”

Celeste rolled her eyes at Elodie and Quinn, but they all remembered that ill-advised Halloween Ouija-board sleepover over twenty years ago.

A sharp rapping sounded at the door, and they all screamed. The door flew open, and there was Ava, dressed in a perfectly tailored plaid Smythe suit, her light brown hair in a top-knot bun, and an overnight bag in her hand. “I’ll take that,” she said, dropping her bag onto the floor and reaching for the Fireball, dodging the pillow Elodie threw at her.

“You scared us, witch,” Elodie said, laughing. “Where’s Sam?”

“In the kitchen with Mom. That should tie Jeannie up for a while. Let’s get into it.”

Despite the reason that had brought them there, the four sisters were thrilled to be back together. For the next hour, they dissected their parents’ news with a fine-tooth comb, interspersed by jokes, tears, and catching up on the minutiae of their lives.

When a knock came at the door and Jeannie entered with a tray of raspberry white-chocolate scones fresh out of the oven, pretending she hadn’t been loitering outside of the door waiting for a break in conversation, they quickly changed the topic to the upcoming wedding the lodge was hosting that weekend, their mom’s Pilates classes, the neighborhood gossip—anything but the elephant in the room. Celeste noted that Jeannie looked tired, as though announcing her retirement had given her body permission to age overnight.

“Mom, are you okay?” Quinn said.

“I’m better now,” Jeannie said, taking in the sight of her four girls sprawled out across the guest room, eyes shining with the delight of a mother whose nest was full again. “What do you want for dinner? Sam’s in the kitchen having some minestrone soup and toast. I’ve got some nice tuna steaks in the fridge I can marinade for poke bowls. Or if anyone wants gnocchi—”

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