No hello. No warm-up. Just my name, tight and strained and already fraying around the edges.
I’d been standing in my kitchen in bare feet, trying to decide whether the strawberries in the fridge were still technicallyusable, when her call came through. I almost let it ring out because I was in no mood for anyone else’s crisis.
Then I heard her voice, and mine changed instantly. “What happened?”
“My mom.” She sucked in a breath that sounded shaky and wet. “She’s at the hospital. I have to go to Boston. I’m leaving now.”
Everything in me had gone still.
“Oh my God. Talia.”
“I can’t do the wedding.” Her words started tripping over each other. “I’ve called everyone I can think of. I don’t have anyone else.”
That got me moving. I tucked the phone to my ear, reached for a pen, started clearing a patch of counter with my elbow. “Okay. Slow down. What do you need from me?”
“I need you to save my life.”
I remember staring at the grocery list I’d written that morning, three things on it, one of them crossed out before I’d even left the apartment. Then I reached for the notepad anyway.
“That depends,” I said. “How expensive is your life?”
She made a sound that was almost a laugh, almost a sob. “I’m serious.”
“So am I.”
And I was, though partly joking too. Talia knows me well enough to hear both things in my voice.
“I’ll give you almost everything I’m making,” she said immediately, like she’d been holding the offer in her mouth, waiting for the first opening.
I leaned against the counter. That made me pause. Not enough to answer right away, but enough to stop pretending it didn’t matter.
“You know I mostly do smaller events,” I said carefully. “Not these giant society-wedding production nightmares.”
“I know. I know, but you can handle it. Better than anyone I know, actually.” She was talking too fast, the way people do when they’re afraid you’re going to say no. “Everything is already set. The timelines are done, vendors are locked, the layouts are approved. You’re really just stepping in and keeping the machine moving.”
Just.
I almost laughed at that too.
There is no such thing asjustwhen it comes to weddings. A wedding is a machine built entirely out of nerves, money, alcohol, and family politics. It’s always one overpriced floral arch away from collapse.
“Talia…”
“Please.” Softer this time. More desperate. “I’ll give you almost all of my fee.”
That got my attention. Not because I’m mercenary, but because my landlord had stuck a polite but increasingly pointed notice on my door, and because I had exactly six eggs in my fridge, one bruised apple, and a bottle of mustard.
I pulled the sweatshirt tighter around myself and stared out the window at the brick wall six feet away. “How much is almost all?”
She told me, and I went very still.
It was more money than I’d made in the last six months.
Enough to catch up on rent. Enough to pay the electric bill. Enough to stop doing that ugly math I’d been doing in my head every time I walked through a grocery store, where I added up the total before I touched anything and still somehow put half of it back.
I lowered myself slowly onto the arm of the couch. “Why almost all?”
“Because if I give you literally all of it, I can’t cover what I already put out,” she said, with the kind of honesty only a woman in active crisis can manage. “But, Sienna, I swear to God, it’s worth it. I’ll send you everything. Every binder, every note, every vendor contact. You just have to get through the weekend.”