Ritual - Palm South University

I flushed, tearing my eyes from his just as Robert said it was time to eat.

I managed to calm down during dinner, mostly thanks to Amanda and Morgan filling any empty space in the conversation. Every now and then, one of them would ask me something, like how California was (beautiful as always), how work was (wonderful, the podcast is growing more and more every day), or, my favorite, how Jacob and I met (at a networking event for local influencers, he was the most charming man I’d ever met — and I made sure to say that last part loud and proud).

But, for the most part, the conversation hinged on the upcoming wedding.

The wedding that would take place on the Cape two weeks from today.

It should have surprised all of us when Morgan said she was marrying a guy she’d dated less than a year, and in two weeks, nonetheless. But, the fact that no one in this family batted an eye is a testament to how well we knew our girl. She had always been impulsive, and not in the way that she’d buy a pair of three-hundred-dollar shoes on a whim. No, for Morgan, it was always the big things — huge changes that she’d make up her mind about overnight and no one could ever talk her out of it.

She cut off all her hair without ever looking back. She changed majors her senior year of college, just because she felt in her gut that it was the right thing to do. She got her first tattoo at a basement party in Boston and bought a horse she kept at a stable outside of town without ever having ridden one in her life.

It was as if she mulled on what her next move would be constantly, and once she decided, that was it. There was no other option.

So, when she met Oliver Bradford during her girls’ trip to the Cape last summer and told me with the utmost confidence that she’d be marrying him before her twenty-sixth birthday, I didn’t doubt it for a second. And when she called me last week to tell me he’d proposed, it didn’t surprise me at all that she wanted to get married on June twentieth.

Four days before her birthday.

I didn’t fight her on it, didn’t try to talk her into waiting or taking her time to plan. I knew my best friend well enough to know there was no use in even trying.

So, instead, I hopped a flight.

And I came back to the town I swore I never would.

After dinner, we all gathered in the backyard around their stone fire pit, and Morgan handed out binders about an inch thick with Wagner/Bradford Wedding Itinerary printed in perfect script on the cover.

“Christ, sis,” Tyler said, shaking his head as he turned the binder over in one hand, inspecting.

“Like you expected anything less from me,” she teased back. Tyler murmured something under his breath, and she bonked him on the head with her own binder before taking a seat next to him.

He was directly across from where I sat, and his eyes lingered on me over the flames from the fire before they fell to the binder in his lap.

“So, I know this is extra,” she admitted as we all flipped through the binder. There was a schedule of events for every single day leading up to the wedding, and an even more in-depth schedule for the day of. “But, I’ve been working with the wedding planner all week to get this set up. And we still have a LOT to do.” She shrugged. “Turns out it’s kind of hard to plan a wedding in two weeks.”

“You don’t say,” her mom mused.

Morgan ignored the jab, and I smiled as she ran through everything we’d be doing over the next fourteen days. When she stopped to take a breath somewhere around the day we’d be doing centerpiece design, I raised my hand like I was in class.

“Yes, Jazzy?”

“Um… I will have time to work during all of this, right? I’ve got two episodes to edit for And All That Jazz, and I’m doing a guest appearance on another big podcast based in New York.”

“Oh, absolutely. Anything not on here is totally free time.”

She answered so confidently, but when I looked at all the time that was planned out, I struggled to find where the off time was.

“I’m sure your fans will survive if you go a week or two without an episode,” Tyler said, the first words he’d spoken directly to me since before dinner.

I didn’t bother looking at him, just licked my thumb and flipped to the next page in the binder. “At least my fans aren’t all junior high girls.”

Morgan laughed at that.

“Sounds like someone’s jealous of my four-million YouTube subscribers,” he taunted back.