Marry Me By Midnight

Chapter 5: What the Body Knows

The nausea hit Ivy during the flower delivery walkthrough, sudden and merciless, timed with the kind of comic cruelty she’d have appreciated in someone else’s life. She excused herself mid-sentence, left the florist holding a sample centerpiece, and made it to the closest bathroom with maybe four seconds to spare.

She’d been telling herself it was stress. Six days trapped in close orbit around Grant Ashford was enough to upset anyone’s stomach. She’d been telling herself that for three mornings now, and the lie was getting harder to hold onto every time she counted backward on her fingers and landed, again, on a date in Vegas.

When she finally emerged, pale and rinsing her mouth at the sink, Sophie was waiting outside the bathroom door, arms crossed, wedding-day stress apparently forgotten in favor of a different kind of alarm.

“That’s the third morning,” Sophie said. “I wasn’t going to say anything the first two times. I’m saying something now.”

“Nerves. Bad shellfish at the tasting. Pick one.” Ivy dried her hands, not meeting her sister’s eyes in the mirror.

“Ivy.” Sophie’s voice had gone soft in a way that was somehow worse than accusatory. “How long ago was Vegas?”

The question landed like a physical thing. Ivy’s hands went still on the edge of the sink.

“Six months,” she said, before she could stop herself, and heard how it sounded the second it left her mouth — heard Sophie do the same math she’d been avoiding doing out loud for three days straight.

“Oh my god.” Sophie’s hand came up to her own mouth. “Ivy. Are you—”

“I don’t know.” It was the first true thing she’d said all week, and saying it out loud made it real in a way the bathroom mirror and the calendar app on her phone hadn’t quite managed. “I bought a test. I haven’t taken it. I’ve been telling myself I’ll deal with it after the wedding, like it’s a seating chart problem I can push to next week.”

“It’s not a seating chart problem.”

“I’m aware, Sophie.”

Her sister pulled her into a hug that smelled like hairspray and the lavender hand cream she’d been using since college, and for a moment Ivy let herself lean into it, let herself be the little sister instead of the wedding planner holding six days of chaos together with color-coded spreadsheets.

“Does he know?” Sophie asked quietly. “Grant. Does he know you might be—”

“No. And he’s not going to, not this week. Not while you’re getting married in five days and every single thing needs to be about you, not about whatever’s happening with me and your brother-in-law.” Ivy pulled back, straightening her blazer, rebuilding the composure she’d spent the last four minutes losing. “Promise me.”

“I’m not going to lie to Grant if he asks me something directly.”

“He’s not going to ask you something directly. He barely knows how to be in the same room as me without one of us finding an excuse to leave.” Ivy managed something close to a smile. “Just — let me handle this my own way. After the wedding.”

Sophie studied her for a long moment, the kind of look that made Ivy feel fourteen again and caught sneaking in past curfew. “Fine. But you’re taking that test tonight. Not next week. Tonight.”

“Tonight,” Ivy agreed, mostly to end the conversation, though some smaller, more honest part of her knew her sister was right — knew she’d been avoiding a bathroom counter and two blue lines the same way she’d been avoiding Grant’s eyes across every rehearsal dinner table this week, as if not looking directly at a thing could keep it from being true.

She didn’t see him again until that evening, at the welcome dinner for out-of-town guests, across a room full of candlelight and toasts and Michael’s aunts asking increasingly pointed questions about when Ivy herself might be settling down. Grant caught her eye once, briefly, over the rim of his glass — a question in it, the same one he’d been asking with his eyes all week, though this one felt different. Are you all right. Not are you thinking about Vegas. Are you all right.

She didn’t have an answer for him. She barely had one for herself.

Later, alone in her hotel room with the door locked and the box from the pharmacy sitting unopened on the bathroom counter, Ivy sat on the edge of the tub and let herself think, for the first time all week, about what happened if the answer was the one she already suspected it would be — about a man she’d sworn would stay a stranger, five days from watching his brother get married, and a truth that wouldn’t stay quiet for six more days no matter how hard she tried to make it.

She picked up the box.

There was only one way to find out.