Page 83 of Love Off-Limits
On Saturday morning, the weather was perfect—unseasonably cool with record low humidity and temperatures hovering around eighty degrees.
“This is perfect wedding weather,” Perry said, stopping beside me on the front porch.
I looked over my clipboard one more time; this was our biggest wedding of the summer. I couldn’t afford for anything to go wrong, so I’d been checking and rechecking every schedule, menu, and event résumé to make sure I hadn’t missed anything.
“Yeah,” I said absently. “It’s going to be nice.”
Perry nudged me, and I looked up to see him staring across the expansive front lawn. Two men—one of them visibly distraught—were walking toward us.
“Uh-oh,” I said under my breath.
“This does not look good,” Perry echoed. “Those are the grooms, right? Isn’t it bad luck for them to see each other before the ceremony?”
The walkie-talkie I had hanging from a lanyard around my neck chirped and Calista’s voice came through. “Olivia, just a heads up. The grooms are on their way to you, and they are not happy. I couldn’t make sense of what they were saying. Something about kidney stones and...”
I silenced her chatter as the husbands-to-be approached the porch. I’d fallen in love with the couple when they’d come to tour the farm and schedule their wedding. They’d introduced themselves as the Ethans—they were both named Ethan—and had charmed me right into agreeing to a major renovation just so we could accommodate their enormous wedding party.
The shorter Ethan was the one who was more visibly upset, his fiancé holding a bracing arm around his shoulders, though both men looked as though they’d been kicked pretty hard.
“We have a problem,” the taller Ethan said as soon as they’d ascended the stairs. His voice was calm, his tone even, but the strain in his eyes was evident.
“Okay,” I said. “We’ll do our best to fix it.”
The shorter Ethan shook his head. “I don’t think this is a problem wecanfix.” He pressed his face into his hands. “Iknewsomething like this would happen. And now we’veseeneach other before the ceremony and that means we’re going to have bad luck and ten thousand other things are going to go wrong.”
Perry shot me a look that clearly said,‘I called that one.’“Why don’t you tell us what’s happened, and we’ll see if we can figure it out.”
Tall Ethan kept a steadying hand on Short Ethan’s back. “Our videographer, Tom, is a dear friend who works with us. He was supposed to drive down this morning to film the ceremony and reception, and his wife just called us to let us know he’s in the hospital with kidney stones.”
“Kidney stones!” Short Ethan repeated. “I tell him he drinks too much Mountain Dew. I tell him!”
“I know, dear,” Tall Ethan said. “You did. And you’re right. But there’s nothing we can do about that now.” He turned his attention back to us. “We have a very specific creative vision regarding our wedding video. Tom’s work is unparalleled. I just don’t think anything will come close to measuring up.”
“Surely we can find someone who can fill in last minute,” Perry said to me. “I can start calling down the vendor list.”
I glanced at my watch. Three hours before the ceremony? On a Saturday in August? That was doubtful.
Tall Ethan shook his head. “I’ve already called everyone Google suggested. Unless you have a secret list, I doubt you’ll find anyone we haven’t already tried.”
“Let me think on this, okay? Why don’t you two head inside? There’s fresh coffee in the dining room. Just relax for a few minutes and let Perry and me see if we can come up with a solution.”
“Thank you,” Tall Ethan mouthed to me as they moved inside.
As soon as they were inside, Perry said, “What about Tyler?”
He was the first person who had popped into my mind, too. But I still hesitated to ask him. It felt wrong after two weeks of keeping my distance. I’d done a lot of thinking the past week. A lot about Tyler, but mostly about my dad and the ways I was hinging so much of my happiness on his singular opinion. It had taken some effort to deconstruct the expectations I’d had since I was a little girl and consider the possibility that maybe I didn’talwaysknow exactly what was right for Stonebrook. Nor did I have any more right to make decisions about the farm than Perry did. Just because I wanted it louder than everyone else didn’t make my desires more important.
I still had dreams. I still believed a restaurant was a brilliant idea. And I still longed with my whole soul to be a part of Stonebrook’s future. But I was beginning to feel more prepared for the possibility of that future looking different than how I’d always imagined it.
“Tyler could probably do it,” I said, even as I shook my head. “But I don’t know if I can ask him to.”
“Why not?”
“Because we haven’t talked in a week, Perry. Because I told him I needed space and it feels really selfish to suddenly need him, but only for work.”
“Livie, this is a big problem. I don’t want to downplay the significance of your fragile emotions, but if he can solve this problem for us, we need him to do it.”
But how could I talk to Tyler again without talking to him about everything? I sank onto a wide bench that sat to the left of the farmhouse front door and dropped my head into my hands.
