“Are you in charge of the invitations?” one elderly woman on a walker demanded.
“There is a third-party firm handling those.”
“Amy,” the woman said, banging her walker at the flower decorator, who was midbite of a large chocolate éclair.
She jumped up and trotted to the front of the room.
“You have chocolate sauce on your face.” I scowled.
She blew me a chocolate-covered kiss. “You want to lick it off?”
I froze.
Amy laughed and took another bite of the dessert.
“We are currently organizing invitations,” she told the crowd. “The wedding ceremony will be at the Broughton estate, which does have a maximum capacity, as everyone here should know.”
People started yelling about who was going to be granted an invitation.
“But,” I said, raising my voice and thinking quickly, “the entire event will be livestreamed to Jumbotrons on the town square.”
“It’s going to be a festival,” someone in the crowd yelled.
“No!” I practically shouted.
“Festival! Festival! Festival!”
Amy joined in the chanting.
“You can’t have a wedding festival,” I protested. “That’s too much, even for Harrogate.”
“It will be a whole weekend event,” Amy said in excitement. “We’ll have competitions and funnel cake and flowers.”
“And everyone has to wear Harrogate colors,” Ida said excitedly.
“No,” Amy said. The Harrogate colors were bright purple and an eye-watering shade of yellow. “Everyone will wear blush colors, like a pink or soft peach. The festival can be the wedding reception. Or…”
Amy looked up at Meg, who looked at Hunter, who shrugged and gave me a questioning look.
“That’s a terrible idea,” I said flatly. “How is that even going to work? You have to have a head table, and people have to serve food. Is your friend going to cater for the entire town?”
“That’s the beauty of a festival,” Amy said, “You have food stalls and food trucks and all sorts of fried things on a stick.”
“This wedding is going to be trashy,” I hissed back at her, the noise from the happy crowd covering my words.
“No, it’s not,” she whispered back. “It’s going to be amazing. Trashy is going on a date with a woman who has a road-kill purse and insults the best bread in the world.”
11
Amy
“Honestly, he said he didn’t want a wedding festival!” I complained to Ivy as I brushed the hair of the horse I was decorating. “Can you imagine? Who moves to a small town and hates festivals? That’s, like, the only point of being in a small town.”
“Harrogate does have a lot of festivals,” Elsie remarked, scratching the horse’s nose.
The sable gray horse’s owner, Grace, snapped photos as I worked. “This is a gorgeous job,” the young woman gushed.
“I love horses,” I said happily.
