Page 48 of How to Say I Do
“Oh, please,” she said, waving my apologies away. “I always arrive early. Keeps the paparazzi on their toes. A herd of them should be showing up in about twenty minutes, hoping to spot me walking up the block.”
As soon as the pleasantries and the small-talk were over, Tessa shifted, and her keen mahogany eyes bored into me. She left a silence between us as I ran my finger around the stem of my champagne glass, and a ball of dread starting forming in my stomach. This wasn’t shaping up to be as smooth as Dinah had expected.
“Noël.” Tessa folded one arm on top of the other and smiled that vague celebrity smile that reveals nothing. “I’ve reviewed all the proposals Dinah has sent over, and I have to say, I’m not a fan. I really expected more out of your firm.”
I’d figured this was coming as soon as she’d hit me with that steady gaze. “Okay. Tell me everything you’re feeling.”
Maybe she’d expected me to protest, or to insist that she was wrong, or to complain that we had worked very, very hard on those plans for her. She blinked, a little bit shocked, looking like she never looked in public—at least for a single second. Then she blinked and pushed out her lips as she considered.
Tessa wasn’t quite sure what she wanted, but she knew what Dinah had pulled together wasn’t right. She was a true global superstar, and, like most superstars, lived with New York, London, and Los Angeles as the three rotating centers of her professional existence. A billion people around the world dreamed their whole lives of making it to those cities, but for Tessa, those cities had turned stale.
“There has to be something outside of New York,” she said, wrapping up a detailed shredding of each and every particle of Dinah’s plan. “The city is so smothering, you know?” She sighed. “None of what Dinah proposed feels like Tyler and me.”
“Let’s figure out something else, then. Let’s find what does scream ‘Tessa and Tyler.’”
She smiled and beckoned for the waiter, hovering a respectful-yet-attentive handful of feet away, to bring us another bottle of champagne.
If we were starting over from scratch, then the first thing I had to do was figure out who Tessa truly was beneath all the glitzy, trashy, click-baity headlines. Our first glass of champagne went down while we got the Wikipedia details out of the way. Tessa was from Kansas and, after walking off the stage of her high school graduation with her diploma and car keys in hand, she’d driven straight to California. She’d worked as a waitress before being discovered at an open-mic night during a bar crawl, and she’d gone from couponing to make ends meet in a shitty Burbank apartment to earning millions with her name, face, and voice everywhere she turned.
She spoke about the surreality of it all. She’d been nineteen and tugged in so many directions by so many different people and forces, good and bad, dark and light, that she’d had to develop a titanium-strong personality to protect herself. That experience—having no one to completely, implicitly, and totally trust, with no one in her corner and no one at all to turn to when the world bared its fangs—had given her both the strength to dominate the industry for nearly two decades and an almost impenetrable distance that kept the world at bay.
For the rest of the morning, we deconstructed that distance, delving into the quiet places of her. Despite her many failed romances, she still believed in fairy tale love and called Tyler her Prince Charming. She headlined concerts in all the capitols of the world, but preferred small towns and open spaces. I got her talking about her and Tyler’s romance, and she told me story after story, weaving the kind of impossibly heartfelt love song that you never heard in New York: Tyler stringing globe lights around his Brooklyn apartment’s minuscule kitchen so they could pretend they were dining beneath the stars; her taking him to Paris and Tokyo and Rome, the two of them sneaking off to pretend to be tourists like normal people; him slow-dancing with her in the aisle of her private jet; her helping him grade worksheets and telling him if he’d been her teacher, she would have been more interested in electrons and atomic weights.
She told me about how happy she was, how she felt like her whole life had led her to Tyler, and that, out of everyone she’d ever met, he was the only one who felt made for her.
She was absolutely correct about Dinah’s plan. Sag Harbor, with its stuffy pretentiousness and ornate fussiness, was no place for the two of them, but I was at a loss to come up with anywhere that could reflect the down-home authenticity of their love story. I was racking my brain, discarding ideas as too well-worn, too trite, too associated with the end of too many marriages.
Until Tessa said, “Oh! And we did awine tastinga few months ago. Can you believe that I had never been? Wine isn’t exactly the drink of choice on tour when you’re nineteen. But Tyler is a wine guy, and he threw me an actual picnic on his living room floor. Blanket, big basket of cheese and fruit and bread, and about twelve bottles of wine to sample. He stuck on this fake pencil mustache and faked this horrible French accent. I was laughing so hard I nearly snorted the pinot grigio!”
My fingers dug into the napkin in my lap until I heard linen start to tear.
The moment crystalized. The quiet clink of silverware, the shift of ice cubes against water glasses. Her smile, so huge and bright and brilliant. I hadn’t seen a smile so breathtaking since—
I drained the last of my champagne. It tasted like an echo, like waves and fist bumping Liam and first kisses and coconut lip balm. “Tessa, I might have an idea where to host your wedding.”
Had I ever seen Wyatt’s ranch, or did I only know it by tear-stained fantasy? Had I seen that gold-grained light, or felt those delicate, lace-edged breezes? Had I run my hand through the hip-high grasses in the fields, or followed a row of trellised grapes over the rise of a hill as they chased the sun? I knew none of these things, had seen nothing of the Gran Cielo Viñedo, but I had spent hours languishing in memories I didn’t own, wandering through enchantments Wyatt had painstakingly painted for me.
“How would you feel about a Texas winery for your wedding?”
CHAPTER13
Wyatt
From: N. Bettancourt, Harrison Ltd.
Subject: High-Profile Wedding Inquiry
Hello Mr. McKinley,
I represent a high-profile individual at Harrison Ltd., a public relations firm specializing in exclusive representation for elite clientele. My client, one of the globe’s most influential celebrities, is currently searching for a premier venue for her wedding. After a comprehensive inquiry, my client would like to explore the possibility of contracting the Gran Cielo Viñedo. If interested, I’ll be happy to send an NDA so we can discuss this opportunity.
Thank you,
Noël Bettancourt
Senior Associate, Harrison Ltd.
New York, New York
