Page 102 of How to Say I Do
I don’t know how many hours passed. The rain fell until my skin shriveled. Even though it was summer, the rain was cool, and the hours I spent outside getting soaked dropped my temperature just enough that I started to shiver.
No one called. Not Tessa, not Tyler. Not Dinah. Not even Micah, who surely had heard the news by now. Nothing happened in the city without him knowing. How many months had he joked with me between photo shoots and movie takes while he knew Jenna and Derrick Kane were ‘secret lovers’? Some friend he was. Some fucking city this was. Not even your friend would tell you your fiancée was faking her half of your relationship, and that everything you believed in, your whole life, was a gigantic fucking fraud—
“Noël?”
I blinked raindrops out of my eyelashes and tried to crawl back to reality. My teeth were chattering. My jaw and my back and my hands ached. I’d been balled up into a tight fist, all parts of me clenched.
Tyler, nerded out in a dorky rain slicker, crouched in front of me. Rain beaded off his nose. He looked worried, but not for his wedding or the bad press about to hit the wires. He looked worried for me.
Which meant he might not know. Yet. I tried to explain everything at once, but all that came out was a groan.
“You’re freezing.” Tyler helped me to my feet. “Come on, let’s get you inside. Tessa’s been in Toronto for the past three days, but she’s on her way back. She should be landing in Teterboro soon.”
“Need to talk to her,” I managed to get out. “Need to talk to her right now.”
“You need dry clothes,” he countered. “Come inside.”
He put me in the guest bathroom with a change of his clothes—plain white t-shirt, Target-brand basketball shorts—and said he’d call Tessa while I warmed up.
My plan was to be in and out of the shower in thirty seconds, but the seconds turned into minutes, and then I lost time beneath the hot water spray. All of my thoughts were coming undone, sliding around like I had swept my life off of a table, one huge sweep of my arm andcrash! Everything I was, everything I did, and the entire life I’d managed to build on my own, lay shattered on the floor. Consequences were starting to settle. I had no idea what would happen next. Or what tomorrow—or even the next hour—looked like.
When I padded out of the bathroom, sticky wet with humidity and Tyler’s shirt hanging off my shoulders, Tessa was already in the kitchen. She stood shoulder to shoulder with Tyler, and they were both staring at her phone.
“Noël,” Tessa said. The flat, cool tone of her voice. The levelness of her stare. The way she wasn’t moving a single muscle, save for one sweep of her gaze over me from head to toe.
She knew. She already knew.
I was too late.
Honestly, it was insane that I thought I could beatElite, or Harrison, or the speed of our industry to get to Tessa. She had a dozen assistants, five managers, and three agents. The editor ofElitecould arch her eyebrows and get anyone on the line. I was one man, one insignificant man, and my delusion had been that I thought I could make an impact here. With her, with her wedding, or with Wyatt. No, I’d been wrong about that.
“What’s going on?” Tessa asked.
I blurted it all out, me barefoot in Tyler’s clothes, the ends of my hair dripping on his hardwood, them squared off against me across the kitchen island as their vision for their wedding crumbled out of Tessa’s phone. I could only imagine what Harrison had said about me and my dazzling array of fuck-ups and all the ballsy choices I’d taken it upon myself to make. I tried to explain, starting with the morning I’d met Tessa—hungover, brokenhearted, not thinking clearly—and stumbling through every step from then until now. The way she’d lit up at Wyatt’s, and how deeply she’d fallen in love with her dream of a small ranch wedding. How she kept picturing something simpler, more intimate, more close knit, more family and friends, less glitz and glam. HowElitehad turned up the pressure, wanting thehugewedding and the grand, media-saturated experience. Wanting, I realized, what Jenna had wanted all those months ago.
“The September issue was going to be dedicated to your wedding,” I confessed. It was the first time I’d ever told Tessa about those plans.
She bowed her head and stared at the floor, lips pursed, her face bunched up tight. Tyler’s hand went to her back, stroking up and down.
And then I told her about Wyatt. About his father, and how the ranch and Liam had fallen on his seventeen-year-old-shoulders, and how he’d been barely into grief when his brother had come to him, stumbling. How Wyatt had stepped up—a-fucking-gain—and how he’d taken his father’s dreams in one hand and Liam and Savannah’s in the other, and he’d held their world together by the strength of his heart. Him watching baby Jason while they finished high school, that little mobile of farm animals spinning as he rocked Jason to sleep in his cowboy boots. Him introducing Peanut to Jason, and him holding Jason’s little finger as they explored the grapevines. Him expanding the vineyard one painstaking block at a time, selling cases of wine in single digits, tending to his home and everyone’s dreams.
One day, he’d boarded a plane to Cancun to celebrate his brother’s wedding and—
When I was done, I stared at my toes. They were curled tight, the knuckles white as bone against the unforgiving floor. I was shivering again despite the heat in Tyler’s apartment. I couldn’t look Tessa in her eyes.
Silence descended. Tessa’s gaze bored into the top of my head. I waited for her to scream, to shout at me, to do something, anything, but she just stood there, silent and still. The rain outside had picked up, pounding against the windows like an angry fist. The world was unraveling around me, and I didn’t know how to fix it.
Finally, after what felt like hours, Tessa said, “Well. First of all, you’re fired, Noël.”
I nodded, numb.
“Look at me.”
It took me a long time to work up the courage to lift my head. When I did, the rage and the fury that I had expected wasn’t there. I thought she’d tear me to pieces, shred me from corner to corner and fling my scraps out the window for the dogs to fight over. I’d deserve it, too. I’d kept things from her, massive, gargantuan facts about her wedding,Elite, Wyatt, and me. I’d trapped her in a no-win situation, with no way out that I could see, and I’d just come crawling to her doorstep a month before the wedding of her dreams, tearing it all apart.
“I don’t want to fire you. I actually want to thank you. You did exactly what I would have wanted. You shielded me, you protected me, and you just saved my wedding. You, Noël, understood me and what I wanted, and, more than that, what I needed. Thank you.”
I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t even try. But words weren’t necessary. The look in her eyes said it all. I tried to pull myself together with two deep, tear-soaked drags of oxygen.
