It Had to Be You by Georgia Clark (iphone ebook reader .TXT) 📕

Liv blanched. “They don’t hire forty-nine-year-old women, Gor. They use us to scare millennials into wearing sunscreen.”

Henry emptied the leftovers into Tupperware. “Would it really be so bad to bring on a business partner? I thought the deck she made was very impressive.”

“Yes, you really need to get better with the computer, darling,” Gorman said. “Being flustered by attachments makes you seem positively Jurassic.”

“Don’t you mean geriassic?” Liv quipped, and Gorman laughed.

Henry put the leftovers in the fridge and shut the door a little harder than necessary. “All I’m saying is Savannah seems very keen. Organized. Passionate.”

“So was Hannibal Lecter!” Liv exclaimed. “Besides, I barely have any vendors on the books anymore. No caterers want to work with me, after the whole shitshow with the pigeons.” The Long Island Bridezilla made a point to mention the escaped non-doves in her one-star review, as well as the bee sting, the broken arbor, and the fact Liv left an hour before the ceremony.

“You still have us.” Henry patted her shoulder. “At our usual generous rate.”

“Thank you,” Liv mumbled, unable to meet his eye. Humility was not Liv’s strong suit.

Gorman pushed aside the bank and credit card statements. “Do you still think she had something to do with it? Getting E to change his will, I mean.”

It was a theory Liv palmed back and forth over the last few months. But now it was clear Savannah Shipley was less a conniving mistress and more a shiny red convertible. “No. Unless she’s a sociopath, and I don’t think she’s that interesting.”

Gorman and Henry exchanged a glance that indicated Savannah’s innocence was something they’d already come to believe. “How are you?” Gorman’s voice was gentle. “Really?”

Liv lifted her hands in tired bewilderment. “What do you want me to say, Gor? Shocked. Sad. Angry, hurt, humiliated, just really… blargh!” She slumped over the table. “Is this really still something I want to do? Be a wedding planner? I am a feminist, you know, and somehow, I’ve ended up in this archaic industry that forces women to do even more unpaid emotional labor while worrying about being too fat. The whole system is designed to equate spending with happiness, and it honestly makes me sick! Maybe I should become a communist and move to the mountains! Get some goats. Goats are easy to keep, aren’t they?”

Henry and Gorman traded another look. Liv-the-commie-goat-farmer had made her appearance in a few other conversations since the funeral.

Henry went first. “Sure, the wedding industrial complex is a hysterical money pit designed to emotionally manipulate couples—we all know that. But the way you plan weddings helps people realize what they actually want. To put a sensible budget first and everything else second. You’ve always kept your prices market rate, and you never upsell couples on things they don’t need.”

It was true. If clients wanted to custom color match the table linens to the bouquet, or ride in on a bucking white bronco, Liv would make it happen. But she also made it clear to couples who had concerns about throwing the now-standard three-day wedding extravaganza that a wedding was to a marriage what a birthday party was to the year ahead: you could skip the party and still have a fabulous year. More than once, she’d talked couples out of hiring her, knowing the resentment and panic of the final bill would not be worth it. Liv also understood that many couples in love in New York (especially Brooklyn) didn’t want a normative, traditional wedding, they wanted a fun, classy party where two people happened to be legally wed. As such, In Love in New York had garnered a healthy reputation for being the city’s best alternative-wedding planner.

“You always plan events that are authentic to the couple,” Gorman said. “Plus, for better or worse, people are always going to get married and hire wedding planners. Why not you?”

Liv harrumphed. But she was listening.

“Besides, don’t you want to go back to work?” Gorman speared an olive from the jar. “You love work. They’d barely cut Benny’s umbilical cord and you were running out for a site visit.”

“For Chrissake, she’s my husband’s girlfriend!” Liv slapped the table, sloshing half a glass of gin.

“Not to sound crude, but he’s not technically your husband anymore,” Henry delicately pointed out. “You can’t be married to someone who’s been deceased for three months.”

“And barely his girlfriend,” said Gorman. “She was a fling! You were his wife. And from what you’d been saying to me for the past few years, he was your husband in name only. Things weren’t exactly thriving, were they?”

Liv made a petulant face—no, not exactly.

“So be the bigger woman,” Gorman continued. “Transcend all that female competitive bullshit.”

“Besides, maybe E really did know something you don’t,” Henry mused. “He must have had a reason, as weird as it all is.”

Liv slurped the rest of her martini, the liquor bitter in her mouth. The truth was, she wanted to want to work. As ludicrous as the meeting with Dave and Kamile had been, it’d given her a taste of her old life. She missed ambition. That invisible, powerful impulse that guided and goaded and gave a day meaning. Liv Goldenhorn had no idea how to get her lust for life back.

But that’s because she hadn’t yet met Sam.

4

Jammed into a subway car so crowded she couldn’t even check her phone, Savannah Shipley was beginning to think she’d made the biggest mistake of her life.

Giving up everything in Kentucky had been the hardest thing she’d ever done. Not to mention the fact she’d basically—okay, she’d definitely—lied about the origins of her new “dream job” to her loving, trusting parents, Terry and Sherry. Her parents’ devotion to their only child was as unwavering as their Sunday church attendance. If they knew their daughter had once purchased a vibrator, let alone carried on an affair with a married New Yorker, Terry and Sherry would have twin heart attacks.

Savannah’s extended circle