Marry Me By Midnight

Chapter 10: The Assistant

The florist’s assistant’s name was Delphine, and she had spent the morning after the brunch replaying five seconds of memory on a loop: a man’s hand flat against a woman’s lower back in a supply room that smelled like eucalyptus, two bodies stepping apart half a beat too late when the door swung open.

She hadn’t meant to say anything. That was the part she kept coming back to.

It happened at the flower delivery for the ceremony arch, hours before anyone in the wedding party knew Sophie already had her answer. Delphine was unspooling ribbon, half-listening to another vendor complain about parking, when she said — to no one in particular, just making conversation — “The maid of honor and the best man have a whole thing going on, by the way. I walked in on them in the back room Tuesday.”

She said it to the caterer’s assistant. The caterer’s assistant said it, twenty minutes later, to a bridesmaid named Katie while loading chafing dishes, framing it as harmless gossip, the kind of thing you pass along at a wedding because everyone’s a little bored and a little drunk on secondhand romance.

Katie did not think it was harmless. Katie had a habit of repeating things she found interesting to whoever would listen with the most drama attached.

By the time it reached Ivy, filtered through three people and roughly two hours, it arrived as a single text from Sophie: Someone’s talking. Katie just asked me if it’s true you and Grant are “secretly a thing.” Told her she was being ridiculous. Call me.

Ivy read it standing in the hotel’s service hallway with a seating chart in her hand, and felt the floor tilt exactly the way it had in Vegas, the exact moment she’d realized the man leaving her room and the man giving a toast six months later were the same person.

She called Grant before she called Sophie.

“It’s out,” she said, when he picked up. “Not the pregnancy. Just — us. Someone saw us in the supply room.”

There was a pause on the line, and she could picture him exactly, jaw setting the way it did when a plan needed revising. “Who.”

“Doesn’t matter who started it. It’s already three people removed. Katie asked Sophie to her face.”

“Okay.” His voice went steady, the tone he probably used when a client’s deal was falling apart in real time. “Okay. What did Sophie say?”

“That it’s ridiculous. Which buys us maybe an hour before someone else asks a more specific question.” Ivy pressed her free hand to her eyes. “Grant, if this gets to your mother, or to Michael, before the wedding—”

“I know.” A beat. “I’m coming to find you. We handle this together, or we don’t handle it at all.”

He found her three minutes later at the end of the hallway, and for once neither of them performed distance. He didn’t touch her — too public, too close to the ballroom doors — but he stood near enough that she could feel the warmth radiating off him, and that alone steadied something in her chest.

“Here’s what we do,” he said quietly. “We don’t deny a rumor that’s technically true. We reframe it. There’s history between us — everyone already half-knows that, Sophie’s known since the fitting. We let people believe that’s the whole story. Old spark, complicated timing, nothing that threatens the wedding.”

“And if someone pushes past that?”

“Then we deal with it then. Not before.” He held her gaze, steady, deliberate. “Two days, Ivy. We just need two more days where the only thing anyone’s looking at is your sister in white.”

She wanted to believe it was that simple. She let herself, for the length of one exhale, because the alternative — imagining Michael’s mother cornering her at the rehearsal dinner, imagining Sophie’s wedding day narrated by a rumor instead of vows — was more than she could hold standing up.

“Two days,” she repeated.

Down the hall, unnoticed by either of them, Katie was already typing a message to another bridesmaid, thumbs moving fast, the story growing one more link longer with every retelling.