Meg took the dress into the fitting room and stood in front of the mirror and looked at herself and the coffee shop confidence wavered. Five days. She was getting married in five days at a grilled cheese restaurant and she was standing in a fitting room in a dress she hadn’t planned for and none of this was how it was supposed to go.
She opened the door.
Natalie was sitting on the bench outside the fitting room. She looked up and her face changed—softened, opened, the way faces do when something is exactly right.
“Oh, Meg,” she said.
“Is it?—”
“It’s perfect.” Natalie stood. Her eyes were bright. “You look like yourself. The best version.”
Paige came around the corner with dress number two over her arm, saw Meg, and stopped.
“Done,” Paige said. She hung dress number two back on the rack. “We’re done.”
"You don't want me to try the others?"
"No," they said together.
Meg turned back to the mirror. The dress was simple. Ivory, not white. It moved when she moved. She could walk on a boardwalk in it. She could stand on a patio in it. She could dancein it, if she decided she was a person who danced, which she was not, except maybe on Saturday she would be.
“I’m getting married on Saturday,” she said to the mirror.
“You’re getting married on Saturday,” Natalie said.
“At a grilled cheese restaurant.”
“At your family’s grilled cheese restaurant,” Paige said. “And it’s going to be the most beautiful wedding I’ve ever planned. Including the castle.”
Meg looked at herself in the mirror—the dress, the woman in it, the face of someone who had finally stopped fighting the obvious answer. She pressed her fingers against her eyes one more time.
Then she bought the dress.
CHAPTER THIRTY
The Shack had never moved this fast.
Meg had called everyone within an hour of buying the dress. Tyler first—Anna heard him whoop through the phone from across the kitchen, which was followed by Stella saying “called it” in the background. Margo second—a short call, Margo’s voice steady and warm, and then a pause that Anna suspected was Margo pressing her fingers against her own eyes in her own kitchen. Joey third—twelve texts in four minutes, seven of them about napkin logistics for the reception, three about the muffin display, one that just said FINALLY, and one asking whether the condiment station would need to be relocated.
By Thursday, Paige had taken over the patio.
Anna watched her work from the kitchen window. Paige moved through the space the way Michael moved through spreadsheets—measuring, assessing, making decisions without hesitation. She’d brought chairs. White. Simple. No debate. She’d strung additional lights along the railing, layered over Anna’s original extension cord setup, and the effect turned the patio from charming to something that made Anna stop mid-prep and stare.
“She’s good,” Tyler said, watching through the window beside her.
“She’s very good.”
“Is it weird that a professional event planner just made our patio look better in two days than we’ve ever managed?”
“It’s not weird. It’s humbling.”
Tyler had claimed the eggs Benedict appetizers before anyone could suggest an alternative. Miniature versions—half-muffins, quail-sized poached eggs, Meg’s hollandaise in tiny cups. He’d been practicing. The kitchen smelled like vinegar.
Anna was handling the grilled cheese trays. Three kinds—the classic, the pesto gruyère Meg had added to the menu, and a new one with fig jam and brie that Anna had been experimenting with. Rosa’s salsa on every table. Chips in baskets lined with parchment paper because Joey said bare baskets were “a hospitality violation.”
And wine. For the first time in fifty years, the Beach Shack could serve wine.
The bottles had arrived Thursday morning. Anna unpacked them and set them on the counter and stood there looking at them—twelve bottles of white, twelve of red, the labels simple and the glass catching the light from the front windows. Gerald’s favor from 1987 had produced a piece of paper from Sacramento, and that piece of paper had turned the Shack into something it had never been.
