Chapter 4 - The Forty-Eight-Hour Countdown
Friday morning—forty-eight hours before the rehearsal dinner—the bomb finally detonated.
I was sitting in the living room nursing Lily when my phone rang. The caller ID flashed: Arthur Mercer.
Arthur Mercer was not a man accustomed to surprises. As the CEO of Mercer Development Corp, he ruled his family and his business empire with an iron fist.
I swiped to answer and pressed the phone to my ear.
"Maya?" Arthur’s voice boomed through the speaker, tight with suppressed rage. "What in God's name is the meaning of this?"
"Good morning, Arthur," I said innocently. "What are you referring to?"
"I just received an urgent billing notice from the Grand Plaza Hotel stating that my primary corporate account has been pre-authorized for a twenty-thousand-dollar rehearsal dinner balance, backed by my signature!" Arthur shouted. "I never authorized this! I told Vanessa months ago that my family was only covering the church ceremony and the reception catering! Who put my name on this contract?!"
I let out a soft, sympathetic sigh.
"Oh, Arthur... I am so sorry," I murmured, pitching my voice to sound distressed. "Vanessa must have made a mistake when she submitted the vendor forms. You know how overwhelmed she’s been with the wedding planning. She probably just checked your name out of habit."
"A mistake?!" Arthur snarled. "Placing a twenty-thousand-dollar catering balance on my corporate ledger without my consent isn't a mistake, Maya—that’s commercial fraud! I'm calling the hotel right now to cancel the entire event!"
"If you cancel the rehearsal dinner forty-eight hours before it happens," I said quietly, "the hotel will publicly release the cancellation notice, and the local wedding blog columns will pick it up by evening. Think about what that will do to the Mercer family name in the society pages. Two hundred high-society guests showing up to a locked ballroom on the eve of the wedding?"
Silence stretched across the phone line. I could hear Arthur breathing heavily, wrestling with his immense pride and his absolute terror of public embarrassment.
"What do you suggest I do, Maya?" Arthur asked through gritted teeth.
"Don't cancel the dinner, Arthur," I advised smoothly. "Pay the bill. And then... have a very serious conversation with your future daughter-in-law about the difference between her budget and your bank account."
"This isn't over," Arthur snapped, and the line went dead.
Ten minutes later, my phone buzzed with a frantic text message from Vanessa:
May you like
VANESSA: WHAT DID YOU DO?! Arthur just called me screaming bloody murder! He said my wedding is a fraud and he’s threatening to cut off funding for the honeymoon! Maya, pick up your phone right now!
I looked at the text, smiled, blocked her number, and tossed my phone onto the coffee table.
