I've done absolutely nothing for six months now, and it's starting to bug me. Six months that were supposed to be all about relaxation and freedom, and yet here I am, finding normality in a homeless woman in Central Park. I sold my company to escape the grind, but maybe I underestimated how much I'd miss having something to do.
I could be anywhere right now. I could be halfway across the world, drinking cocktails on a beach or hiking through mountains. But instead, I'm here, running the same paths, sitting on the same bench, talking to Valerie. It's not that I don't enjoy it—I do—but there's something unsettling about the quiet. The lack of urgency. I spent years building something enormous from nothing. And now, I've stopped. Completely.
Some days, it feels like a relief. Other days, it feels like a void.
I watch Valerie wheel her cart away. She's a constant in a city that never stops changing. She's unshakable in her own way, navigating her life with a clarity I can't understand. I envy her, sometimes. The simplicity of it. The certainty.
The park is starting to fill up now, the trails filled with runners, families, and tourists. I stretch and start running again.
3
LIV
Another day, another wedding. The exodus begins at 2 A.M. Drunk guests head outside to stumble into Bentleys and Maybachs, their uniformed drivers standing at attention. These aren't your average wedding guests calling Ubers—every single person here is worth at least seven figures, and they move through the world accordingly.
Some of the younger ones, the tech heirs and hedge fund kind, head upstairs to the mansion's guest suites. The older money prefer their own beds and their own staff waiting at home. I watch them go, mentally checking off names against my guest list. The Weatherbys—pharmaceutical fortune, third generation—climb into their Rolls Royce Ghost. Mrs. Weatherby struggles slightly with the car door. Her husband doesn't help her; his attention is on his phone.
The big weddings are always the same. The guests arrive in a flutter of excitement and leave in a haze of expensive champagne and social exhaustion.
I maintain my smile through sheer force of will, my cheek muscles aching from hours of picture-perfect expressions. My feet are screaming inside these heels—a necessary evil in thisbusiness where appearance matters as much as execution. But I can't leave yet. Not until the bride and groom make their exit. It's an unwritten rule I learned early in my career: the wedding planner is the last to leave, always ready for that final moment when the bride wants to express her gratitude or share her overwhelming emotions about the day.
Grooms, on the other hand, are typically focused on one thing at this point in the evening—sobering up enough to perform their husbandly duties. They rarely seek out their wedding planner for heartfelt conversations. Rory Valentine is no exception. I can see him across the terrace, loosening his Tom Ford bow tie while his groomsmen huddle around him. He's swaying slightly, the telltale sign of a man who's been sampling the Macallan 25 a bit too liberally.
My mind shifts into post-event mode, running through the comprehensive breakdown checklist that starts the moment the last guest leaves. Floral arrangements need to be dismantled—the bride specifically requested that certain pieces be preserved and delivered to her sister's Manhattan penthouse tomorrow. The crystal and china, all rented from a specialty company that caters exclusively to events of this caliber, must be inventoried and packed with museum-level care. The string quartet's equipment needs to be moved to the service entrance. The ice sculptures—three of them, each costing more than most people's monthly salary—will be melted and disposed of by 3 AM.
I can see my team lingering in the shadows like well-trained ghosts. They're dressed in black uniforms that help them blend into the background, invisible as they're meant to be during events like these. Sophie catches my eye and gives me an almost imperceptible nod. They're ready. They've done this dance hundreds of times before. By 6 AM, the hall will look like nothing ever happened there.
That's the beauty and tragedy of my work. I create perfection that's designed to disappear.
And then I see her—Priscilla Valentine, née Hamilton. Even after seven hours of celebration, she looks almost ethereal in her custom Vera Wang gown. Her hair, styled by a colorist who flew in from Paris specifically for this weekend, remains mostly intact, and she's approaching me with that particular walk wealthy women perfect—confident but graceful, never hurried.
Priscilla comes from pharmaceutical money, fourth generation. Her great-grandfather developed three major antibiotics that are still prescribed today. The family fortune has been multiplied through strategic investments and advantageous marriages. She's thirty-two, Harvard MBA, sits on the boards of two major charities, and now married Rory Valentine, whose family made their billions in commercial real estate development across the Eastern seaboard. Together, they're worth approximately 2.3 billion dollars, though numbers like that shift daily based on market fluctuations and property valuations.
Rory is thirty-five, Princeton and Wharton, with old-money confidence that comes from never having worried about anything more pressing than which yacht to take to the Hamptons. He's handsome with good bone structure and a trim body. His hair is thick and his teeth are whitened to an unnatural but still socially acceptable degree of brightness.
Together, they’re beautiful, wealthy, well-connected, and statistically doomed.
Wealthy couples divorce at rates that would make gambling addicts nervous. The Kardashian marriage to Kris Humphries lasted seventy-two days. Britney Spears' first marriage lasted fifty-five hours. Even staying within my professional sphere, I can count at least a dozen couples whose marriages lasted less than a year.
Approximately fifty percent of all marriages end in divorce, but when you narrow it down to people with liquid assets over ten million dollars, that number jumps to nearly sixty-five percent. Add in family businesses, inherited wealth, and the pressure of maintaining generational fortunes, and the odds get even worse. There's something about extreme wealth that corrodes intimate relationships. Maybe it's the inability to trust whether someone loves you or your portfolio. Maybe it's the way money insulates people from the normal consequences that force couples to work through problems. When you can afford separate houses, separate vacations, separate lives, there's less incentive to do the hard work of partnership.
"Olivia," Priscilla says, emotion thickening her voice. Her eyes are bright with tears that threaten to spill over her makeup. "I don't even know how to thank you. This was..." She gestures around us, taking in the remains of the evening—the scattered flower petals, the empty champagne glasses, the soft music still playing from hidden speakers. "This was absolutely perfect. Exactly what I dreamed of."
I reach out and take her hands in mine, feeling the weight of her fifteen-carat engagement ring against my palm. "Priscilla, it was my absolute pleasure. You were such a joy to work with, and seeing your happiness tonight—that's why I love my job."
The lie comes easily. The truth is more complicated and far less sentimental. I care about perfection, about execution, about the flawless orchestration of an event that will be remembered and talked about for years. Whether the marriage itself succeeds or fails is entirely outside my purview and, honestly, not something I spend much time worrying about.
Priscilla squeezes my hands. "We're heading straight to the jet," she says. "For a two-week honeymoon in Bermuda. We'll be staying at the Cambridge Beaches Resort—you know, the one with the private pink sand beaches."
Of course I know it. I've planned three weddings for couples who honeymooned there. Two of those couples are already divorced.
"That sounds absolutely magical," I tell her, and I mean it. Even if the romance won't survive the realities of merging two massive fortunes and all the family politics that come with them.
Rory appears at her side, having apparently pulled himself together enough to travel. "Ready, honey?" His arm slides around her waist. "The pilot's waiting, and we need to be wheels up within the hour."
Priscilla turns back to me one last time. "Seriously, Olivia. Thank you. For everything. I know I was probably..." She laughs, a sound that's part embarrassment, part exhaustion. "I know I was a lot to handle sometimes."
She wasn't, actually. Compared to some of my clients—the oil heiress who changed her mind about the color scheme four times in the final week, the tech heiress who insisted on having her deceased grandmother's ashes incorporated into the floral arrangements—Priscilla was remarkably reasonable.
