One
I hate weddings.
“Poor Edith,” my great-aunt Ruth said every time. “Always the bridesmaid, never the bride.”
Today, she was sitting at the next table with Grandpa Kennedy, who didn’t seem to know where he was. A matronly nurse buttered his bread roll as two of our former nannies chatted about life in general and how lovely—and surprising—it was to finally see Eisen get married. My brother hadn’t shown any signs of settling down until Janie came along.
Great Aunt Ruth was right in one respect. I was always the bridesmaid. I figured that honour came thanks to my ability to organise awesome hen dos, and I always volunteered for the job because if I arranged the event somewhere quiet and classy, we avoided the inevitable bar crawl, the loss of shoes, and puking into a bush at the end of the night. We also avoided men. Ruth was wrong in one respect too—I had no regrets about avoiding bridehood. I fully intended to remain a spinster for the rest of my life.
I surreptitiously checked my phone again. Nothing from Jazzi. At least, that was the name she’d given me—I didn’t know whether it was her real one or not.
“She still hasn’t called?” Salma whispered.
“Nope.”
Salma was my assistant, and she’d brought her girlfriend to the wedding. She and Robyn had been dating for almost six months now, and I was keeping everything crossed that this relationship wouldn’t end in disaster the way the last two did. Eisen’s assistant, Bex, was sitting with us too, along with her husband and little boy—slightly awkward because the little boy was also my first cousin once removed, and his father, aka my cousin Robert, was glowering at us from a table in the back corner. Eis hadn’t wanted to invite Robert at all. In fact, he’d wanted to elope, but Mama said that if he tried to elope, she’d never forgive him, so they compromised on a small wedding in late August.
Small. Ha. Janie had gone quite pale when she saw the guest list, but with a little diplomacy-slash-pressure from Eis, Mama had whittled it down to only three hundred and twenty guests, along with half an orchestra, a six-tier cake that was a work of art in its own right, a carriage pulled by actual horses, a jungle of florals, and thousands of fairy lights twinkling from the ceiling of the marquee in Eisen’s backyard like an overachieving waterfall.
My brother kept glancing at his watch, checking whether it was time to leave for the honeymoon yet. His two stepsons would stay with Janie’s parents for two weeks while she and Eis went to the Maldives, and then the four of them would be heading to Wonder World Italy for a family holiday.
They needed the break, but I couldn’t deny I was unsettled by the thought of my brother being away for nearly a month. He was my rock, the person I called whenever I felt an anxiety attack coming on.
I could do this. I could.
Salma had promised to stay with me whenever I needed her, even overnight. Maybe Robyn would come too? My townhouse had eight bedrooms, so there was plenty of space. Eis and I used to share the place, but a series of disastrous events had led to him turning our country house into his home. Now his and Janie’s home. I still had a room here, as he had a room in the London house, but our lives were no longer intertwined the way they used to be.
He had his family.
I had my work.
Vocare.
In Latin, it meant “to call,” vo-car-ay, and I wished I’d had someone to talk with when I was raped thirteen years ago. But when I’d tried calling the crisis line, a man had answered, and I freaked out. That had been my first anxiety attack. There had been many more since.
At first, I’d run Vocare using family money—just me, two employees, and a handful of volunteers sitting in a converted reception room at my townhouse, waiting for the phone to ring. Now we had a separate base, seventeen employees, and over three hundred volunteers. Software let most of our team work from home, and funding from corporate partners and other family trusts allowed us to rent a small office in a nearby building, so my house was empty once again. Recently, we’d branched out with an online store selling safety products—personal attack alarms, scrunchies that expanded to cover a glass, straws that changed colour if a drink contained drugs, that kind of thing. Where possible, we tried to source items from small, woman-owned businesses because they deserved our support.
All of which was to say that, other than Eisen and my papa, men didn’t play a big part in my life.
So why did I catch myself glancing across at Heath Carlisle?
I’d only met him once before, last year at Eisen and Janie’s Halloween party, and he’d stood out because in our brief conversation, he’d treated me as though I was an actual human being, not a potential bed buddy, an ATM, or a silly little girl who didn’t know her own mind.
Tonight, he was with a perky brunette. I thought that she laughed too much, but perhaps that was because I judged her against myself and I barely laughed at all. Men were always telling me to smile more.
And Uncle Dennis was no exception. He wasn’t really my uncle. He was a friend of my father’s who’d manifested himself into the role when I was about two years old.
Now he leaned across from Grandpa Robinson’s table. “Cheer up, love, and just ignore Ruthie—it’ll be your turn soon enough.”
“Oh, I don’t believe it will.”
“A pretty blonde like you? I bet the men are lining up outside your door.”
I forced a smile. “That’s why I have security cameras.”
“Are you coming to Angus’s art thing next week?”
Not if I could help it. By “art thing,” Dennis meant my third-cousin Angus’s first solo exhibition at the Luddington Gallery, which was quite an achievement, but unfortunately, a certain subset of men seemed to use those shows as speed-dating events. I didn’t need to spend an hour making small talk with a bunch of disingenuous douchebags who’d googled my net worth and marital status before they came to speak with me.