Marry Me By Midnight

Chapter 11: Damage Control

The rehearsal dinner was held in a private room strung with fairy lights, forty guests deep in champagne and toasts, and Ivy spent the first hour of it performing the single hardest role of her career: a woman with absolutely nothing to hide.

She’d rehearsed the line with Grant beforehand — old history, complicated timing, ancient news — and deployed it twice already, once to Katie directly, with a flat, bored delivery that seemed to actually work, and once to Michael’s cousin, who’d clearly been sent by someone as a scout.

It was working. That was the terrifying part. It was working exactly as well as a plan that could still collapse in a single unguarded look.

“You’re doing great,” Sophie murmured, refilling Ivy’s water glass under the guise of sisterly attention, her voice pitched for Ivy alone. “Katie’s already bored of it. I heard her tell someone it’s probably nothing.”

“And if it’s not nothing to Michael’s mother?”

Sophie’s smile flickered, just slightly. “Then we handle that if it happens. It hasn’t happened.”

Across the room, Grant was doing his own version of the same performance — easy, unbothered, laughing at his brother’s jokes, refusing to let his eyes find Ivy’s more than once every twenty minutes, each glance timed and brief and controlled. She understood, watching him, exactly how much effort it was costing him to look like it cost him nothing.

It was Michael who nearly undid it, not out of suspicion but out of pure, oblivious happiness. He stood for his own toast late in the evening, tie loosened, half a glass past careful, and said, grinning, “I have to say — best thing about this wedding, besides Sophie, obviously, has been watching my brother actually let his guard down around someone for the first time in about a decade. Grant, man, whatever’s going on with you this week — it’s a good look.”

The room laughed, warm and easy, exactly the kind of gentle ribbing a groom gives his brother. Nobody but Ivy, Sophie, and Grant himself understood how close the comment had walked to the truth, or how carefully Grant had to hold his expression in the half-second before he laughed it off.

“Don’t get used to it,” Grant said lightly, raising his glass. “To Michael and Sophie.”

The toast moved on. The moment passed. But Ivy caught Grant’s eyes across the table in the aftermath, and what passed between them wasn’t relief — it was the shared, exhausted understanding that they’d survived a near miss by inches, and there were still two more days of near misses left to survive.

Later, in the quiet after the dinner wound down, Grant found her by the coat check, both of them putting off the walk back to their separate rooms a few minutes longer than necessary.

“That was close,” he said.

“Too close.” She looked at him, really looked, letting herself drop the performance for just a moment now that no one was watching. “Grant, I don’t know how we do two more days of this without something slipping.”

“We don’t have a choice.” He reached out, tucked a strand of hair back from her face, the gesture small and unhurried in the empty hallway. “One day at a time. Tomorrow’s the day before. We just have to get through tomorrow.”

“And the day after that’s the wedding.”

“And the day after that,” he said quietly, “is the first day we don’t have to hide anything from anyone.”

She wanted to believe that too. She let herself, again, for one more exhale, standing close enough to him that the coat check attendant discreetly looked away.