“I think this chart is upside down,” I said finally.
“Ah.” Hunter turned it around.
“No, maybe it was the right way.” I let out a breath. “Maybe we shouldn’t have fired all the wedding planning staff.”
Hunter snorted.
“Meg is on the warpath. She would skin anyone who took one of her sisters, even though she complains bitterly about them. She is furious that Tatiana took your little brother. She hates injustice. She’ll get Alfie back one way or another. And she’s going to make sure the people responsible are punished.”
Hunter seemed confident, but I wasn’t at all. I stared at the colorful papers with my eyes unfocused, my brother the only thing I could think about.
49
Amy
“We need to fire her,” I spat when Ivy reminded me the next morning that Tatiana and her wedding party were coming in for a meeting.
“We literally cannot afford that,” Ivy said sharply, making me hang my head.
“I know. It’s my fault.”
“Look,” Ivy said, her tone softening, “let’s all try to pretend Meg’s wedding is going forward this weekend. She prepaid for all the food, flowers, and the cake, correct?”
Elsie and Sophie nodded.
“We’ve had brides fire us before then rehire us when they realized they couldn’t plan their own wedding, and no one decent is going to be able to step up to plan a wedding two days in advance.”
“Yeah,” Brea said, “but it’s usually because of something the bride did, not a mistake we made.”
“You mean a bad decision I made,” I said bitterly.
I had spent all of the previous night drinking and eating junk food. Now I felt terrible, and my face was breaking out. It was also probably partially from the stress of needing to find a new place to live. What was worse was that I couldn’t even move back to Harrogate, because I didn’t want to ruin Sebastian’s life any more than I had, and I didn’t think he could survive seeing me around town.
“Oh god,” I said, having a sudden horrible thought. “My flower business! It’s the only thing keeping the farm afloat. Oh my god, my granddad is going to lose the farm if work dries up.”
“Which is why we need to do a stellar job for Tatiana’s wedding,” Ivy said. “Then we’ll look at branching out into other states, since New York is going to be effectively closed for us.”
“We do high-end weddings,” Grace reminded her.
“We might need to lower our standards,” Ivy admitted.
“I am not making a dress out of polyester!” Brea declared.
And I didn’t ever want to see Tatiana again. But an hour later, there she was, in the office with her entire entourage, including Alfie. Normally, Alfie was upbeat and excited about life, but Sebastian’s little brother was bedraggled and downtrodden. It hadn’t even been twenty-four hours, and he was like a different kid.
“Do you want a snack?” I asked him anxiously.
“No,” Tatiana snapped at me. “Don’t feed him anything. He’s already tried to run away twice, so he’s only eating potatoes for one meal a day until he cooperates and becomes part of the family.”
Alfie gave me a baleful look.
I’m so sorry,I mouthed at him.
He looked down at the floor.
I felt like absolute shit.
You need to do something.
