“Don’t tell her that.”
“Too late.”
Five minutes later, Kayla came in with two iced coffees, kissed Rose’s mother on the cheek, and waited until she’d confirmed there was no live mic nearby before she spoke at full volume.
“Production lead wants your confessional moved to today. Something about the lighting in the room they’ve set up. The producer just stopped me to tell me.” She handed Rose a coffee. “And they’re fully rigged in the rose garden.”
Rose had seen the rig going up. “Those are my favorite flowers.”
Her mother said nothing, which said quite a lot.
“Lizanne said they’ll replant anything that gets damaged,” Quinn offered.
“That’s not the point.”
Nobody argued with that, which she appreciated.
She’d rebuilt this entire wedding in the past few days. Every element that had been Trina’s was gone. The florals, the lighting, the timeline, the table plan — all of it reconstructed around a woman Rose understood in one register and barely at all in any other. She’d done it efficiently and she’d done it well, and she was aware that the competence with which she’d thrown herself into the work was at least partly because the work was the only part of this she actually controlled.
Heels on the stone path outside. Rose recognized the pace before she saw her.
Lizanne came around the side of the pool house with a stylist a step behind, which was standard. She took in the covered pool without comment. Rose noted that.
“They want to shoot in the kitchen with both of us making breakfast,” Lizanne said, stopping at the door. Her voice was low, the cameras not yet in range.
“I ate.”
“It’s for the pilot episode. We have to look like we live together without looking like we’ve been told to look like we live together.” She paused. “How’s Daisy this morning?”
“She’s renamed the pony twice already. It was Gerald, now it’s Biscuit.”
“Gerald didn’t suit it?”
“Apparently not.”
Lizanne’s mouth moved, not quite a smile. “I saw her in the hall earlier. She told me Biscuit had strong opinions about the curtain color in the playroom. Biscuit doesn’t like pink. I could change it.”
“It’s not about the curtains.” Rose said it quietly, and Lizanne held her gaze for a moment and didn’t push it. That was something Rose had started to notice: Lizanne knew when to stop. She pushed constantly and in every direction and then, occasionally, she just stopped, and those moments were harder to dismiss than the pushing.
“Five minutes,” Lizanne said.
She turned and went back toward the main house. Rose’s mother waited until the footsteps faded.
“She seems—”
“Don’t.”
“I was going to say organized.”
“You were not going to say organized.”
Her mother picked up her cup and looked out the window at the main house, where a lighting assistant was now crossing the lawn with a cable reel over each shoulder. Kayla was on herphone. Quinn had drifted back to his, the ambient performance resuming.
Seven days to the wedding. A year sitting on the other side of it, in rooms that didn’t belong to her, under lights that were pointed at her life and calling it content. Rose picked up her cold coffee, finished it, and went to get ready.
Chapter 15
Lizanne
