Present - Greg
I was sitting in my brother’s condo, nursing a Jameson and Mountain Dew when I felt my phone vibrate in my pocket. I didn’t bother to pull it out to look because, even if it wasn’t Lilly, it was one of the girls and I didn’t want my ass chewed out today.
I heard the front door open and then close, Max and Chase’s voices drowned out the dull beating of my heart. I swore that this morning, when I would walk into that courthouse, I was going to die with how rapid it was beating. I had tried to prepare myself since the first day in Tessa’s office, but nothing could have prepared me for the knowing that I was breaking Lilly’s heart, something I had never wanted to do, but it had to be done.
“This better be fucking worth it.” Max sat down in the chair next to me. “Alexa has been blowing up my phone all morning and I’m pretty sure she knows that I know.”
“I promise, it will be worth it.” I slapped him on the shoulder.
“Pssh, yeah, not having sex for a whole week doesn’t seem worth it.” Max grabbed for my drink and downed the last of it, coughing up a little, not having realized that it was filled with whiskey. “Fuck, dude, alcohol, already?”
“Trust me.” I ignored his question and stood up from the chair. I looked at Chase and Jack standing in the kitchen. “It will be worth it.”
“So where do we start?” Chase spoke up next.
“We’ve got the church all set up and decorated,” Jack answered.
“I got with my parents last night and let them know what is going on, and I tried to contact Lilly’s family, but only got ahold of her brother, Eric. He said for sure he was going to be there.” I pulled out my phone to check again. As much as I hated Lilly’s family, I had recognized the look on her face when we were in the chapel in Vegas as one of longing. She had always been the woman to want a fairy tale wedding, and I wanted to give that to her. I just needed to make sure she was mine first.
The divorce was never part of the plan, but if I wanted to do this right, I knew I needed to start fresh, so tomorrow I was going to “accidentally” bump into Lilly at Stone Mountain. Max and Chase had already made a plan to get all of the girls there, and I was going to propose to Lilly at the top of the mountain. But it wasn’t like the divorce was real.
When I went to the courthouse this morning, I got in touch with Tessa and Judge Baker to let them know what I had planned. Judge Baker was all for it, and I found out she was a romantic deep down at heart. I had a document already made up that was in all the sense Lilly signing that she loved me and wanted to spend the rest of her life with me, not divorcing me like I knew she would think. I knew she was going to be too upset to even read through it to realize that it wasn’t real. By the way my phone kept going off, I knew my assumption was correct. Which meant that everything was going according to plan.
The rest would happen tomorrow night, with the hope that she said yes when I pulled out the ring, that she would come with me to Helen, where we already had the wedding decorations set up. Pastor Charles had already promised that no one was going to be in there to mess with anything.
“We’ll make sure the girls don’t know anything until after we’ve left the mountain,” Chase piped up.
“And their phones are taken away.” Max leaned over to high-five Chase. All of these guys had been in on this plan for weeks, with us trying to get a wedding dress for Lilly and decorations. Pastor Charles had been great at keeping this secret from everyone so we could have the chapel. All of the business trips I had been on recently were actually for me to come up to Helen anytime I got an order in so that we could place the items in storage. The night that Lilly went rogue from our “business lunch,” the guys and I were picking up Lilly’s wedding dress from the airport. I wanted them to be the first ones first to see it, and then we had headed to Helen and back to drop it off.
When I had opened it in the car, I swore I could have cried. The thought of seeing Lilly walk down the aisle in that gorgeous black lace dress had me almost dropping to my knees a week early to ask her to marry me again.
“The flowers came in this morning, so I think if we head up now, we’ll make it back in time that no one will notice.” Jack grabbed for his jacket hanging on the back of my chair.
“Yeah, that sounds good.” Chase followed him towards the door, but Max stayed behind.
“Hey, man, I’m sorry for being so harsh in the conference room the other day.” Max waited as I grabbed for my jacket on the counter.
“No problem. I knew it was going to be an uncomfortable meeting, but I didn’t realize just how great it would work out until I saw just how pissed Lilly was.” I knew the look on my face was a shit-eating grin, but I didn’t care. When I say we had everything planned, I mean everything. Even down to my asking out April and not telling Lilly.
The guys and I had formulated a plan that night on what I could do to get Lilly to fall more in love with me, and then it came to me. I needed to make her jealous. I hadn’t expected her to retaliate, but I should have seen it coming. That was just who Lilly was, she always acted out when she was upset.
Today I was hyper-aware, trying to figure out exactly what Lilly might be doing at any given minute. I knew this divorce wasn’t going to be something she would just brush off, but I at least made it so that Alexa and Erica were with her, so that she couldn’t do anything too drastic. Chase and Jack’s assistants were running the office, since it wasn’t often that everyone was gone, but it seemed like a wedding was a pretty damn good reason. We had done it for Max’s, so why not mine.
My phone buzzed again as we made our way into Jack’s truck. I decided to take a look this time, and saw that among all of the messages from Erica and Alexa, there was one there from Lilly’s brother.
Come over to the house, please.
He had included an address to what I assumed was his house, even though I had never been there before. Lilly’s parents and Eric were the only ones from her family that still lived in Georgia. Her sisters had moved out of state once they married and Jim just traveled where ever the wind took him. Even though Eric still lived here, after he and his wife had popped out two sets of twins, they never had any more time for Lilly, and I knew that hurt her the most. To have family so close, but to never see them, or have them want to see you.
“Hey, can you drop me off here before you guys head up?” I showed Jack the phone so he could put the address into his navigator.
“You aren’t coming?” Chase questioned.
“Lilly’s brother just messaged me to come over.” I shrugged, not knowing what I was walking into. When Jack finally pulled in front of the house I was shocked beyond words. To call this was a house was an understatement. It was a mansion and I wondered how much money Lilly’s family actually had. I was starting to think this wasn’t Eric’s house.
There was a gate in front of the driveway and I had Jack just drop me off, letting him know that I would get an Uber if I got out of here and they weren’t headed back into town already. I pushed the buzzer and the gate immediately opened. I slipped through when the littlest of a crack would let me and made my way up the winding hill of a driveway.
I was out of breath by the time I reached the top and saw an older man standing in the front doorway. He was braced against a pillar, cigar in hand, with smoke filling the air around him. I righted myself and forced my shoulders back, to make it seem like I was taller than I actually was, because the man I was approaching was for sure not Lilly’s brother and if I had any other guess, it would be her father. And that man stood at least half a foot taller than me.
