Chương 2: The Empty Aisle
Maeve is three time zones and one bad hotel mattress away from Santa Barbara when the first photo hits her phone, and for one long, suspended second she thinks it's a mistake, someone's sent her the wrong link, because the aisle in the picture is white ranunculus and empty chairs and a groom standing alone at the altar in a suit she picked out herself.
You knew this was coming, she tells herself, thumb frozen over the screen. Knowing it was coming and watching it happen are not the same thing.
That was hours later. First, there was the morning.
Frankfurt greets her the way a city greets someone it has no particular opinion about yet: gray, efficient, entirely indifferent to the fact that she has just detonated the last two years of her life somewhere over the Atlantic. Her hotel room is small and clean and smells faintly of a lemon disinfectant that has nothing in common with the eucalyptus candles Wyatt insisted on burning in every room of the apartment she no longer lives in. She has not slept. She has, instead, spent the flight doing the one thing she is genuinely, uncontestedly good at: turning a disaster into a project plan.
By six in the morning local time, she has rewritten her portfolio twice, translated her cover letter into passable German with the help of an app and pure spite, and sent it to eleven wedding and luxury event firms whose names she recognized from industry panels she used to attend as someone else's plus one. She has, in other words, done exactly what she always does when the ground disappears from under her. She has built new ground, fast, out of whatever's on hand.
The unknown number texts her again just after seven, while she's standing in the shower trying to remember what her own thoughts sound like without someone else's schedule layered over them.
Elke Fischer. We met at the Bergstrom wedding expo two years ago, you did the floral architecture for the atrium installation. I still think about it. If you're serious about Frankfurt, the Reinhardt Group is hiring a creative lead for their events division. It's not an easy interview. Worth it if you can survive it.
Maeve reads it twice, towel still wrapped around her hair, and feels something in her chest do a small, cautious thing that isn't quite hope. She has heard the name Reinhardt before, the way anyone in luxury events has heard it, spoken with the particular reverence people reserve for a brand that doesn't advertise because it has never needed to.
Worth it if you can survive it, she thinks, toweling off, already composing her reply. That's the first honest job description anyone's given me in two years.
She writes back a single line, professional, unhurried, the tone she'd use closing a deal rather than begging for one. I'm serious. Tell me where to send the portfolio.
Elke's reply comes back faster than Maeve expects. Don't send it. Bring it. Tomorrow, nine sharp, Reinhardt Tower. They don't review portfolios here. They test you live.
Maeve sets the phone down on the bathroom counter and looks at her own reflection for a long moment, hair dripping, eyes tired in a way sleep alone won't fix. Tomorrow, she thinks. You have one day to become someone this company wants, in a language you barely speak, in a city you landed in eleven hours ago.
She spends the rest of the morning walking, because sitting still in a hotel room with nothing but her own thoughts for company has never once ended well for her. Frankfurt in daylight turns out to be a city built on quiet, deliberate contrasts, glass towers standing shoulder to shoulder with half timbered houses that survived a war Maeve only half remembers from school, and she finds something steadying in it, the way a place can hold two entirely different eras at once and simply refuse to apologize for either. She buys a coffee from a stand near the river and drinks it slowly, watching barges move past with the unhurried patience of something that has never once needed to prove itself to anyone.
This is what starting over actually looks like, she thinks, watching a woman walk past in a coat cut with the kind of restrained, expensive precision Maeve associates with old European money rather than new industry money. Not a montage. Just a woman standing by a river, holding a coffee, trying to remember how to want something for herself.
It's almost enough to keep her from checking her phone again. Almost.
The first text from Rina arrives at noon Frankfurt time, which she does the math on later and realizes is early morning in Santa Barbara, hours before the ceremony was ever supposed to start. Tiff's fan account already has a countdown clock running. Two hundred thousand views before the flowers are even set up. I hate that I know this. I hate more that I can't look away.
Maeve had known, in the dim, procedural way she knows most things about Wyatt now, that he wouldn't cancel the wedding outright. Canceling would mean admitting something had actually gone wrong, and Wyatt Lang has never once, in two years, admitted that anything is his fault when a better story is available. She'd assumed he'd stall, delay, blame her publicly for cold feet. She had not, somehow, expected him to simply show up and stand at the altar as though enough conviction alone could produce a bride out of thin air.
That's exactly the kind of thing he'd do, she thinks, sitting on the edge of the hotel bed now, phone in both hands. Perform certainty so hard the cameras believe it before he does.
The photos start arriving in a steady, merciless drip over the next hour, forwarded from Rina, from Yoon, from a dozen entertainment accounts Maeve unfollowed months ago but apparently still haunts in some algorithmic afterlife. Wyatt at the altar, jaw set, watching the doors. Wyatt checking his watch, the gesture reading, to anyone who doesn't know him, as anxious groom and, to Maeve, as a man recalculating his angle in real time. Wyatt's publicist, visible at the edge of one frame, already on her phone, already, Maeve would bet everything she has left, drafting the statement that will turn a no-show bride into a supporting character in someone else's story.
Tiff's fan account, when Maeve finally makes the mistake of opening it herself, has already decided who the story's actual heroine is. Jules held his hand the entire time, one caption reads, beneath a photo of Jules dabbing at her eyes in the front pew, somehow already dressed for a role no one has cast her in yet. Ten years of being there when it mattered. Some women just know how to show up.
Some women have had ten years of practice looking devastated on command, Maeve thinks, and closes the app before the bitterness in that thought can curdle into something she'll regret feeling this early into her new life.
She scrolls one comment further before she can stop herself, a reply stacked beneath Tiff's post with forty thousand likes already gathering under it. Maeve probably couldn't handle real love. Some people are built for the spotlight and some people are built to stand behind it. Maeve reads it twice, feeling the particular sting of being reduced, by a stranger who has never met her, to the one job title she actually earned. Assistant. Support. The woman who stands behind, never beside. She sets the phone down harder than she means to.
You spent two years building his spotlight, she thinks, staring at the ceiling of a hotel room in a city where absolutely no one knows her name yet. Let's see how well it holds up now that you're not the one wiring it.
By three, the officiant has read a brief, careful statement to the assembled guests, the kind of language lawyers write for exactly this occasion. Circumstances beyond the couple's control. No mention of Maeve by name. No mention of a resignation email sent from a parking garage the night before. Just an absence, dressed up as mystery, left for two hundred people and several hundred thousand strangers online to fill in however they like.
Wyatt fills it in for them himself less than an hour later, in a statement Maeve reads standing at her hotel window, watching the gray Frankfurt sky do nothing in particular. The past few months have been difficult. I'm grateful, more than I can say, for the people who've stood by me through it. Jules has been that person for ten years, long before any of this, and I won't pretend that isn't something worth honoring publicly now.
He's naming her. Maeve reads it twice, feeling the particular vertigo of watching someone rewrite four seasons of her own life into a single flattering sentence about somebody else. He's not even trying to hide it. He's turning the muse into the bride in one afternoon, and he's going to let the whole internet believe it was always supposed to be her.
She sets the phone face down on the desk and makes herself breathe, once, slowly, the way she used to breathe before walking onto a set that was about to catch fire in six different ways at once.
Let him have the headline, she thinks. You have an interview in eighteen hours, and nobody in this city has any idea who Wyatt Lang is.
It isn't quite true, and she knows it even as she thinks it. Somewhere in the gray, indifferent efficiency of this city there is, apparently, a man important enough that even Elke Fischer's texts have gone careful and clipped whenever his name comes up. Maeve had asked, lightly, over a second exchange of messages, who exactly would be running tomorrow's test.
Elke's answer arrives just as Maeve is finally, finally closing her laptop for the night, portfolio rebuilt, cover letter proofread three times over by an app that keeps insisting on formality she isn't sure she can pull off in person.
The COO himself, usually, for creative lead candidates. He doesn't delegate this one. Fair warning: he's ended interviews in under four minutes before. He calls it efficiency. Everyone else calls it something less polite. His name is Leon Reinhardt. Good luck. You'll need exactly the kind of nerve you just showed by getting on that plane.
Maeve reads the name twice, feeling something under the exhaustion sharpen into focus, the particular alertness of walking onto a new set for the first time and realizing, mid step, that this one is going to matter.
She doesn't sleep much that night either, though this time it isn't grief keeping her awake. It's the small, insistent hum of a woman rebuilding her entire portfolio presentation from scratch at one in the morning in a language she is not yet fluent in, for a man who apparently ends interviews the way Wyatt ends phone calls he's tired of, without warning, without appeal.
At five minutes to nine the next morning, standing in the marble lobby of Reinhardt Tower in the one blazer she packed that doesn't smell like the life she left behind, Maeve checks her phone one last time before switching it fully off. A final text from Rina, sent hours ago and only now surfacing through the time difference.
Whatever happens in there, you already won the harder round. Go show them what he lost.
Maeve slides the phone into her bag, squares her shoulders in the reflection of the elevator doors, and watches the number above them begin to climb toward a floor she has never seen, toward a man she has heard described in exactly four minutes' worth of warning, and feels, for the first time in two years, something that isn't dread at all.
The elevator doors open onto a hallway of glass and steel that swallows sound the way expensive things always do, and somewhere at the end of it, already waiting, is a closed office door with no name plate, only a small, discreet brass plaque that reads, simply, L. Reinhardt, and Maeve has exactly the length of that hallway left to decide who she's going to be when it opens.