She laughed right in the middle of the Tuscan villa courtyard, raising her prosecco high as she announced, “I was too broke to even step foot in Italy. Then she shoved a seating chart into my hand and told me the staff needed to hurry up.”
I looked at the paper, then up at the ancient stone gate. I just smiled, because the owner listed on the contract for her sixty-thousand-dollar wedding was actually me.
My name is Claire White. If you looked at my résumé, you’d see a very boring, very stable career in risk management at Greyfield Holdings. You’d see a thirty-six-year-old woman who wears charcoal suits, keeps her hair in a tight bun, and speaks only when necessary.
You’d see someone practical, someone reliable, someone who supposedly counts pennies because she lacks the imagination to spend them. But standing there with the Tuscan sun beating down on the terracotta roof tiles of Villa Santelia, none of that mattered. The smell of wet limestone was thick in my nose, a heavy mineral scent, grounded and old.
I wiped my forehead with the back of my hand, leaving a streak of gray dust across my skin. My work shirt—a simple white linen button-down—was damp with sweat and stained with grime. Ten minutes earlier, the main breaker for the west wing had tripped during a sudden afternoon storm that rolled through the valley.
The local electrician was an hour away in Florence, and the caterers were screaming about the refrigeration units. So I had gone down into the spider-infested, stone-walled utility cellar and fixed it myself. I knew the wiring of this villa better than I knew the veins in my own hands.
I knew that the third fuse from the left was temperamental and that the grounding wire needed a very specific jiggle to reconnect. I emerged from the service stairwell, blinking against the sudden brightness of the late afternoon light. The storm had passed, leaving the sky a bruised purple and gold—the kind of light painters spent lifetimes trying to capture.
I was exhausted. My knuckles were scraped. I wanted a shower.
I wanted a very strong espresso. Instead, I walked straight into a performance. The central courtyard of the villa was a masterpiece of Renaissance architecture, framed by arched loggias and lined with manicured cypress trees that stood like silent sentries.
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