Chapter 2 - Two Days' Notice

Two days before her wedding, she showed up at our house without so much as a text.

She came through the kitchen door with a fat binder under one arm and three fabric swatches fanned out in her hand.

"Della. Grant. The restaurant flooded."

I put my coffee down. "It what?"

"A pipe let go overnight. The whole dining room at Alder and Vine is under water. Ruined."

Whatever friction there was between us, I felt for her in that moment. "Brooke, I'm so sorry."

"I've already called every hotel and event space inside sixty miles," she said, dropping the binder on my counter. "Everyone's booked solid." She flipped it open to a glossy photo of the lake house. "So we'll just do it here."

I looked at the picture. "At my grandmother's house?"

"At your lake house, yes."

"You can't put on a wedding there in two days, Brooke."

"It's a house on a lake, Della. People pay a fortune to get that exact look."

"It's not a venue. It's a home."

She flicked her hand like she was shooing a fly. "We barely need anything. Chairs, tables, a dance floor, some flowers."

That last word made me sit up straight.

"The garden is off-limits. All of it."

"Nobody's talking about your garden."

"You just said flowers."

"I meant centerpieces. Arrangements."

"The answer's no."

Her jaw dropped. "You'd let my whole wedding fall apart when you've got an empty property just sitting there?"

"It's not sitting there. I'm in it every week."

That's when Brooke started to cry — the careful kind, the kind that never smudged her mascara. Grant walked in right on cue.

"My wedding is in two days," she told him, "and Della would rather babysit a flower bed than help your own sister."

Grant looked at me. I knew the look. It was the one that asked me, one more time, to be the reasonable one.

But I also knew what walking away from that venue would cost her. Lost deposits. Relatives already booking flights from three states away. A year of planning gone because of one bad pipe.

So I said yes.

I made her say every rule back to me out loud.

"Nothing gets cut from the garden. The bed borders don't move. No heavy tables on the soft part of the lawn near the water."

"Obviously."

"Every bit of trash goes home with you that night. Nothing inside the house gets moved, used, or touched."

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Brooke finally lifted her head. "Della. I know how houses work."

I should have heard that for what it was.