Page 47 of How to Say I Do
She was twenty-six and dating the son of a New York real estate mogul, and she clearly had her eyes on a big future. I hadn’t expected her to be cutthroat with her ambitions, but while my name was doing time in the dumpsters, she was taking a turn as Harrison’s right hand and heir apparent. Stack up our client books against each other? I had more dollar weight and star power, but she was doing everything she could to flip that around.
I hadn’t heard a word from Dinah since I returned from Cancun. Or, more to the point, since I’d been given theEliteFashion Week parties, which was the kind of event that defined careers. In October, after Fashion Week concluded, and if the parties went off to champagne accolades and breathlessly tittering praise, I would be forever known as Noël Bettancourt of Harrison Ltd. who threwthoseEliteparties, you know,thoseones. If Dinah could somehow arrange for my tragic death with enough lead time to seamlessly take over theEliteaccount, she would step to it.
“Dinah, what’s up?”
There was a long, weighty silence. “I need your help.”
My eyes peeled open. I said nothing.
“Look, I have a brunch today at Michael’s with Tessa Yarborough. You know Tessa Yarborough, right?”
“Yes, I know Tessa Yarborough, Dinah.”
You’d have to be dead to not know who Tessa Yarborough was. Even comatose patients in long-term care facilities had to know Tessa Yarborough.
Tessa was famous from Alaska to South Africa, Dubai to Moscow, Melbourne to Taipei. She sold out multi-day concert series at NFL football stadiums, not just pithy little venues like Madison Square Garden or Caesar’s Palace in Vegas. She had been a superstar since age nineteen, and had deftly managed to stay at the forefront of the music industry for nearly twenty years. She composed, performed, and produced. She was a country-pop Beyoncé-level star.
Tessa Yarborough was also famously,fabulouslyunlucky when it came to men. No one relished Tessa Yarborough’s endless cycle of heartbreak with all the leading A-list men more than the paparazzi. Her crash-and-burn love life had sold a billion dollars’ worth of clicks and headlines.
Then, out of the fucking blue, she’d announced she was engaged… to a science teacher from Brooklyn named Tyler Walker, someone she’d met while volunteering with hurricane cleanup in the city. Turned out, Tessa loved to quietly volunteer, and had been working in teen shelters and building homes with Habitat for Humanity for over ten years. Part of me wept at the decade-long loss of good press that could have wiped out all the midnight paparazzi snaps showing off her puffy eyes and smeared eyeliner, and another part of me—a part that sounded like Wyatt—reveled in the honest and anonymous altruism, so at odds with the modern grab for social media points.
Tessa and Tyler became overnight sensations after making their debut on the red carpet at the Grammys. Most civilians—unused to the punishing grind of fame and the microscopic plundering of your private life that came with the paparazzi’s telephoto lens—would have crumbled at Tessa Yarborough’s side, but Tyler never flinched.
Unbelievably, it seemed Tessa Yarborough had found The One.
Even more unbelievably, when it came time to plan her wedding, she’d called Harrison Ltd. I’d been well out of romantic commission at the time, so Dinah landed the account. Tessa’s wedding, according to the most breathless of the internet gossip blogs, was going to bethewedding of the generation. Tessa was pop culture royalty, and her wedding was going to put an exclamation point on that fact.
“Look, the party last night? It was out of fucking control,” Dinah whined. “You wouldn’t even believe it if I tried to explain, Noël. It was a fucking nightmare. All of the Victoria’s Secret models decided to show up? And, like, they weren’t on the list? But how are you going to tell a hedge fund bro that,no, actually,youcan’tjust bring fifty lingerie models into an invite-only party?”
I closed my eyes and grunted.
“It was anactualzoo, oh my God. And this total bitch, she didn’t want to leave, so she threw her vodka cran all over my Dior before a bouncer could get her out of there. Ugh, I needed, like, four Cosmos to come down.”
“Only four?”
“You weren’t even there, Noël.”
I was sure she hadn’t gone to bed yet. She probably hadn’t even stopped drinking. “What do you need?”
“You have to go meet Tessa. We have a brunch scheduled, at Michael’s—”
“Yes, you said.”
Her voice went higher, tighter. I could picture her with her eyes blazing, her fingertips mashed together like a snake’s head striking the air as she spoke. “Justgo, Noël. All you need to do is nod your head and agree with everything she says. I’ve got everything under control, got it?”
“Tell me what I need to know.”
“Tessa didn’t know what the fuck she wanted when we first met. It was a lot of maybe this or maybe that, but what about this? After amillionback-and-forths, she decided she wants the country thing. So, that’s the Hamptons, right? Sag Harbor. There’s the Yacht Club, Shelter Island, the Tennis and Surf Club, whatever. It’s the standard shit, Noël. Rent out the whole place, helicopter the guests from a pre-party at the Ritz, put everyone up in exclusive accommodations for a week. You know the photos alone will pay for the entire wedding.Elitehas already said they want exclusive rights, and they’re willing to pay for the wedding.”
The thought of diving back into wedding planning made me want to buy a case of that shit Texas wine and go swimming in sugar turpentine.
“Just smile and nod, okay? And tell me every word she says. That’s all you need to do.”
“Sure, Dinah. Whatever you say.” Anything to end this conversation.
“Brunch is at ten. Don’t be late.” The line clicked.
Tessa was already at Michael’s when I arrived, comfortably seated at table one and sipping champagne as she expertly ignored all of the stares and whispers and obscenely angled selfies trying to catch her in the background of a shot. She looked casually effortless, the way only $40,000 annually for dermatologists and hair stylists can achieve. I greeted her with a kiss on the cheek and a flurry of apologies on Dinah’s behalf. And on mine, since she’d clearly been there for a while.
