Chapter One — The Wrong Flowers
The centerpieces were wrong.
Not catastrophically wrong. Not in any way a normal person would notice. But I had spent four months selecting ivory ranunculus over white peonies specifically because ranunculus held their shape in October humidity, and whoever had arranged the reception hall this morning had mixed in garden roses — which would be soft and browning by cocktail hour — and I needed that fixed before my mother arrived and decided it was a metaphor.
I was forty minutes early. That was intentional.
I did my best work before other people arrived. Before Daniel's mother started asking about the seating chart. Before my maid of honor Lena started offering opinions nobody requested. Before my father started standing in corners looking like a man managing something he preferred not to discuss.
Forty minutes of quiet. Just me, the venue, and seventeen items on a checklist that had been living in my phone since August.
I pushed open the reception hall doors and stopped.
There was a man at the far end of the room.
His back was to me. White catering uniform, sleeves rolled to the elbows in the specific way of someone who had never found formal dress entirely convincing. He was directing two staff members with a kind of quiet authority that didn't raise its voice because it had never needed to. One of the staff members moved immediately. The other hesitated. The man simply looked at him, and the hesitation ended.
I knew that quality. That particular, unhurried certainty.
I knew it before he turned around.
But knowing something is coming doesn't prepare you for it. I'd learned that about myself over the years — I was excellent at anticipating things and completely unprepared for them anyway. A personal failing I'd never quite resolved.
He turned.
Five years left the room.
"Marco."
His name came out of me before I'd decided to say it. Embarrassing. Revealing in the specific way of things said before the sensible part of your brain catches up to your mouth.
He didn't startle. He didn't do anything abrupt. He simply looked at me the way you look at something you've been expecting, and the calmness of it was somehow worse than surprise would have been.
"Sofia." A pause, just long enough to feel considered. "Congratulations."
The word landed at a strange angle. Not warm exactly. Not cold. Calibrated — which was the thing I remembered most about Marco Ricci, five years ago and apparently now. Everything about him was calibrated.
I crossed the room because standing in the doorway felt worse than moving. "What are you doing here?"
"Working." His eyes moved — briefly, once, toward the main entrance — and then back to me. "You should check the flowers by the south exit. Someone moved them."
I looked toward the south exit. The arrangement there was visibly off — shifted left, asymmetrical against the window frame.
"How do you know where the flowers are supposed to be?" I asked.
He had already turned back to his staff.
Not an answer. Not a deflection. Simply the end of that particular conversation, delivered with the ease of a man who had decided what he would and wouldn't discuss and found the decision required no further explanation.
I checked the south exit flowers. They were wrong. I photographed them and sent the image to the florist with a message that was professional and not at all indicative of my current interior state.
Then I walked back through the hall making notes on my phone, adjusting a chair here, flagging a linen there, doing the work I'd come forty minutes early to do. Marco's staff moved around me without comment. Marco himself had drifted to the far side of the room, speaking quietly into what I now noticed was an earpiece.
An earpiece.
I was almost at the door when I heard his voice behind me — low, unhurried, in the middle of a sentence I'd caught the end of.
"The timeline moves at two. Make sure everyone is positioned before the first guests arrive."
I stopped walking.
I did not turn around.
Two o'clock was when the ceremony started. Positioned was not a word you used about catering staff. And a timeline, in the context of a wedding, referred to the schedule — cake cutting, first dance, speeches.
But the way he said it didn't sound like cake.
I pushed through the door into the corridor and stood there for a moment with my checklist open on my phone and seventeen items still unaddressed and the absolute certainty, landing somewhere in my sternum with the weight of something I didn't want to be true, that Marco Ricci had not come here to cater my wedding.
I just didn't know yet what he'd come for instead.
