Don't Trust the Groom

Chapter 2 72 Hours

I woke at six.

Not gradually — not the slow, reluctant surfacing of ordinary mornings. I was simply asleep and then I was awake, completely, the way you were when your mind had been working through the night and had finished what it needed to finish and was ready to begin.

Thursday. Three days before the wedding.

Seventy-two hours, give or take.

I lay still for a moment and looked at the ceiling and took stock of myself the way I did before large events — the professional inventory, the assessment of available resources versus known challenges. It was a habit from work. It was useful now.

What I knew: Cole Whitmore was not entirely who he appeared to be. I did not know in what way. I did not know how significantly. I did not know whether the not-knowing was a danger or a disappointment or something I could, once I understood it, live with.

What I had: seventy-two hours, a mind that noticed things, seven years of professional experience in navigating complicated arrangements under pressure, and a best friend who was three doors down the hall and would, if asked, do almost anything.

What I did not have: a plan. Yet.

I got up.

* * *

Lily was already in the kitchen when I came through. She had the particular morning energy of someone who had slept well and was constitutionally incapable of being subdued before ten o'clock — coffee made, the radio on low, a plate of toast on the counter that she was eating while reading something on her phone with the focused expression of a woman consuming information.

She looked up when I came in.

"You look terrible," she said. "Sit down. I'll make you coffee."

"I look fine," I said.

"You look like you slept for forty minutes and spent the rest of the night arguing with the ceiling." She was already at the coffee machine. "Which is fine, it's your wedding week, everyone argues with the ceiling the week before their wedding. Sit down."

I sat down.

She put coffee in front of me and sat across the table and looked at me with the expression she wore when she was deciding how hard to press something.

"Tell me," she said.

I looked at my coffee. "It's nothing."

"Serena."

"It was a message," I said. "On my phone last night. From an unknown number." I kept my voice level. "Just — strange. Probably nothing."

"What did it say?"

I looked at her. At the open, direct face I had known since we were eighteen, which was not capable of performing a reaction — whatever she felt it showed, immediately, which was one of the things I loved about her and one of the reasons I was careful what I said next.

"It said the flowers had been changed from white roses to cream," I said. "For the ceremony. I checked with the florist and it's fine — just a miscommunication. It's sorted."

She looked at me.

I held her gaze and drank my coffee and presented the expression of a woman who had received a minor logistical notification and was mildly tired.

"Right," she said, after a moment. "As long as it's sorted."

"It's sorted," I said.

I hated lying to Lily. I had been lying to Lily approximately three times in the twenty-three years I had known her and each time it had sat in my chest like a swallowed stone. This time was no different. But I needed to think before I talked. I needed to know what I was talking about before I involved someone else in it. I needed to be sure — or as sure as seventy-two hours allowed — before I said the words out loud to anyone.

Because saying the words out loud made them real.

And I was not ready for them to be real yet.

* * *

Cole called at eight-thirty.

I was in the spare room by then, sitting on the bed with my phone and my thoughts and the clear, cold determination that had arrived with the morning. I looked at his name on the screen and felt the familiar pull of it — the two years of him, the warmth and the directness and the grandmother's ring on my finger. I felt it and I answered.

"Good morning," he said.

"Good morning." My voice was entirely normal. Another thing I had learned professionally: the voice was the last thing to betray you if you controlled it. "How did you sleep?"

"Badly," he said. "The night before the last night before things. You know how it is."

"I do," I said.

"Are you at Lily's?"

"Yes. We did the dress last night."

"And?" I could hear the smile in it.

"And it's a dress," I said. "You'll see it Saturday."

He laughed — the easy, natural laugh that I had fallen in love with, that still landed the same way it had the first time. "I miss you," he said. "Two more nights and then I have you for the rest of my life."

I looked at the river through the window.

"Two more nights," I said.

"I have the Whitmore solicitors coming this afternoon," he said. "The estate documents — the final sign-off before we combine the accounts after the wedding. It'll take a few hours. I'll be tied up until six at least."

"That's fine," I said. "I have the rehearsal dinner setup to finalise anyway."

"Serena." His voice shifted — something warmer, something that had always made me feel entirely certain. "Saturday. You and me. That's all it is."

"I know," I said.

"Are you nervous?"

"No," I said.

Which was not entirely true. But the nervousness I was feeling had nothing to do with Saturday in the way he meant, and I was not going to tell him that.

We said goodbye. I held the phone for a moment after the call ended and stared at his name on the screen and thought: solicitors this afternoon. Tied up until six.

A window.

* * *

I called in a favour at nine o'clock.

The favour was owed by a man named Peter Walsh, who ran a small private investigations firm on the west side of Hartwell and who owed me, specifically, the recovery of a situation at his daughter's wedding three years ago that had involved a missing florist, a substitute band who played exclusively jazz in a venue booked for contemporary pop, and a seating plan error that had placed his ex-wife and his current wife at adjacent tables. I had resolved all three in under four hours. He had told me, at the end of that evening, that I could call in the debt at any time.

I called it in.

"I need information," I said, when he answered. "Quickly and quietly."

A pause. "How quickly."

"Seventy-two hours."

Another pause — longer, the pause of a man recalibrating. "That's a short window."

"I know."

"What kind of information?"

I looked at the river. "Background. On a person. I want to know if there's anything in someone's history that a standard search wouldn't find. Employment records, financial records, anything that doesn't match the public version of the story."

"The groom?" he said.

I went still. "What makes you say that?"

"You're calling three days before your wedding and asking for background on a person." He paused. "I'm a detective, Serena."

"Yes," I said. "The groom."

A long moment. "Cole Whitmore?"

"Yes."

"Whitmore Industries?"

"Yes."

He was quiet for a moment in a way that had a specific quality — not the thinking quiet, not the assessing quiet. The quiet of a man who had just received information that intersected with something he already had.

"Walsh," I said. "Do you know something?"

"I'll look into it," he said. "I'll call you this afternoon."

"Walsh —"

"This afternoon," he said. "Be somewhere private."

He hung up.

I stared at the phone.

The quiet of a man who had just received information that intersected with something he already had.

He knew something. Or he knew someone who knew something. Or he had heard something, in the particular way of private investigators who kept their ear to the ground of a city and heard, sooner or later, most of what moved through it.

The stone in my chest shifted.

* * *

I spent the morning doing the things I was supposed to be doing.

This was important — not just as cover, though it served as that, but because the work was real and the wedding was in three days and the fact that I was investigating my fiancé did not make the rehearsal dinner setup disappear or the florist confirmation unnecessary or the transportation logistics for the Whitmore family self-managing.

I was an events planner. I planned events. I did this under pressure and with incomplete information and in the presence of people who did not know the whole story, which was, I reflected, essentially what I was doing right now in a different context.

I called the rehearsal dinner venue. I confirmed the menu. I resolved the Gerald-Marcus seating crisis by placing Gerald at table four near the window, which he would like because he liked windows, and Marcus at table seven near the bar, which he would like because he liked bars, with three tables of buffer between them.

I texted Cole's mother Eleanor to confirm the Whitmore family arrival times at Ashford Manor on Friday evening. She replied promptly — Eleanor Whitmore was always prompt, always gracious, always the precise temperature of warm that never quite became hot. I had liked her, in the early months. I still liked her. I was trying not to think about what it would mean if what I was beginning to suspect had any substance, what it would mean for Eleanor and for Arthur and for the whole careful architecture of the Whitmore family that I had been walking toward for two years.

I texted my mother.

“Everything on track. See you Friday.”

Her reply came in under a minute, which was my mother's standard response time for anything wedding-related for the past six months. “Dress is pressed. Gerald says don't seat him near that awful Grey man.”

I stared at the message.

Then I typed: “I know, Mum. It's handled.”

She replied with a string of heart emojis and a reminder to eat breakfast.

I ate breakfast. Lily made more toast. We talked about the weather forecast — clear for Saturday, which was the only forecast that mattered — and about the rehearsal order and about whether Gerald's speech needed to be given a time limit, which it did, Gerald was a man who had never in his life said in two sentences what he could say in fifteen.

All of it ordinary. All of it normal. The surface of a Wednesday morning three days before a wedding, unbroken.

Underneath: Walsh's quiet. The message. The locked study. The client meeting in Dunmore that Marcus Grey had not confirmed.

I kept the surface steady.

I was good at surfaces.

* * *

Walsh called at two-fifteen.

I was in the spare room with the door closed, which I told Lily was for a call with the Ashford Manor venue coordinator, which it was not.

"Tell me," I said, when I answered.

"Cole Whitmore," Walsh said. He had the particular tone of a professional delivering a prepared briefing — careful, sequential, nothing editorialised. "Thirty-two years old. Co-founder of Whitmore and Grey Architecture with Marcus Grey, established six years ago. Prior to that, three years at Dunmore Greystone — a firm in Dunmore. Prior to that, university at Crestfield." A pause. "All consistent with his public record."

"But," I said.

"But," Walsh said. "There is a gap. Between Crestfield and Dunmore Greystone. Eight months. Not on his CV, not referenced in any professional profile, not explained."

"Eight months," I said. "Where was he?"

"I don't know yet," Walsh said. "I have a contact working on it." A pause. "There's something else."

I waited.

"The Dunmore Greystone firm," he said. "He left under circumstances that weren't entirely voluntary. There was a dispute — the details were sealed, both parties signed NDAs. But my contact at Dunmore says the word at the time was misconduct."

The word settled in the room.

"What kind of misconduct," I said.

"I don't know yet," Walsh said. "The NDA is tight. But I'm told it involved a woman."

I looked at the river through the window.

"A woman," I said.

"That's all I have so far." He paused. "Serena. I want to ask you something and I want you to answer me honestly."

"All right."

"Is there anything else? Anything you've noticed, in your time with him, that's felt — not right."

I thought about the phone calls in other rooms. The locked study. Marcus Grey's performed blankness at the mention of Dunmore. The way Cole sometimes went somewhere deliberate in the middle of a conversation.

"Yes," I said. "There are things."

"Tell me."

So I told him. All of it — the things I had been filing and not looking at directly. The pattern that had been sitting in the back of my mind for weeks. I told him in the calm, sequential way of someone delivering a briefing because that was the only way I could say it without the stone in my chest becoming something larger.

Walsh listened without interrupting.

When I finished he said: "The study. You said it's always locked."

"Always."

"Does he carry the key?"

I thought about it. "There's a key on his keyring. I assumed it was for the office building."

"Could you describe it?"

I described it. Small, brass, distinctive — an older key, the kind that fit a traditional lock rather than a modern one.

"That's a residential interior key," Walsh said. "Not an office key. Office keys are standardised — different profile." A pause. "He keeps the study locked with a residential key that he carries on his person."

"Yes," I said.

"I need you to do something for me," Walsh said. "If you can do it without raising suspicion."

"Tell me."

"Get into that study."

I looked at the door of Lily's spare room. At the ordinary, wooden, unlocked door of it. I thought about the door at the end of the upstairs corridor of Cole's house — our house, as of Saturday, the house I had been spending my weekends in for over a year, the house I had been told held archive materials and storage.

"He's with solicitors until six," I said.

"Then you have four hours," Walsh said.

"I don't have the key."

"No," Walsh said. "But you know where he lives and I know a locksmith."

I sat in Lily's spare room on a Thursday afternoon three days before my wedding and thought about what I was doing — what I was really doing, underneath the professional calm and the controlled voice and the steady surface.

I was dismantling my own life.

Or I was finding out whether it needed dismantling.

Or I was doing the thing I had learned, at cost, to do: looking directly at the thing I had been not-looking at.

"Give me the locksmith's number," I said.

Walsh gave it to me.

I wrote it down.

"Serena," he said, before he hung up.

"Yes."

"Be careful." A pause — not dramatic, not performed. The genuine, specific pause of a man who had been in this business long enough to know when something had the quality of more than it appeared. "Whatever is in that study — be prepared for the possibility that it changes things."

"I know," I said.

"And be prepared for the possibility," he said quietly, "that it doesn't change them in the way you expect."

I thought about that after the call ended. About the two directions a thing like this could go. About the specific terror of not knowing which direction you were heading until you were already there.

I looked at the locksmith's number on the page.

I picked up my phone.

I dialled.