Downgrade My Ride? I'll Upgrade My Groom! novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Certificate

Liv holds up her marriage certificate in front of three hundred guests, takes her mother's pearls back from Bailey and quits, and then finds the viral clip calling her unstable, shared by her own father.

The quartet stopped in the middle of a bar.

Three hundred people turned around in their chairs.

I heard a fork hit a plate somewhere near the back.

Niles lowered his glass an inch.

For one second his face did nothing at all.

Then it smoothed out into the smile he used on investors.

"Liv," he said into the microphone. "Thank God. We were all so worried."

Nobody in that room had been worried.

The girl from social was already filming.

"You're bleeding on the carpet," Niles said, still smiling. "Let's get you upstairs. We'll talk privately."

"We can talk here."

I walked down the center aisle between the tables.

My bare feet were cold on the marble.

I'd picked this marble. I'd flown to Vermont to look at the slabs.

Bailey put her hand on Niles's arm.

Her eyes went to my eyebrow, then to Clay's jacket on my shoulders.

"Oh, Liv," she said in her soft little voice. "We didn't know if you were coming. Somebody had to stand up there. The guests had flown in."

"In my mother's dress."

"It's what you would have wanted," she said. "For it not to go to waste."

A woman at table four said, "Oh, honestly."

I couldn't tell whose side she was on.

I stopped in front of the head table.

"There was a crash," I said, loud enough for the back row. "I came here with blood in my eye. Nobody from this table called at all."

Niles sighed into the microphone.

"Accidents happen, sweetheart. I'm sorry you got a scratch. But you can't blame Bailey for keeping the day on track."

"I'm not here to blame anybody."

I opened the envelope.

I held up the certificate so the candles caught the seal.

"I'm here to tell you not to wait for me next week," I said. "I'm already married."

The silence was so complete I heard the ice settle in the champagne buckets.

Niles laughed.

It was a big, easy laugh, and a few people laughed with him because they always did.

"That's not funny, Liv. Who'd you get to sign that, a notary at a gas station?"

"A judge," I said. "On Clark Street. Fifty-two minutes ago."

"To who?"

Clay came up the aisle behind me.

He didn't hurry.

He stopped at my shoulder, put his hand flat on my back, and looked at Niles.

I watched Niles recognize him.

Everyone in Chicago who wanted money knew Clay Eastman's face.

Niles had spent eight months trying to get a lunch with him.

"Mrs. Eastman," Clay said pleasantly. "Since you asked."

Somebody at table nine actually gasped.

Niles's smile cracked down the middle and didn't come back together.

"You're kidding me," he said, and he wasn't talking into the microphone anymore. "Him? Your little neighbor?"

"My husband."

I turned to Bailey.

She took a step back into the table and a glass tipped over.

"Those are my mother's," I said.

"Liv, don't make this ugly."

"You wore her dress to kiss my groom. It's already ugly."

I reached up and took the first pearl out of her ear.

She didn't stop me.

I think she was too shocked to move.

I took the second one.

They were warm from her skin, and I hated that.

I closed them in my fist.

"Keep the dress on," I said. "I'll get it back when you're done with it."

Sydney appeared at the side of the room with a hotel cart.

My cake was on it.

Four tiers, lemon and elderflower, white sugar peonies she'd made by hand at three in the morning.

"Excuse me," she sang. "Coming through. Sorry. Baker's privilege."

She wheeled it straight past the head table toward the service doors.

"That cake is paid for!" Niles snapped.

"By the bride," Sydney said over her shoulder. "Who's leaving."

People were laughing now, and it wasn't at me.

I took the microphone out of Niles's hand.

He was too stunned to keep hold of it.

"Since most of you work for Kenward," I said, "you should hear this from me. I quit as brand director, effective now."

The two guys from sales looked at each other.

"I'm keeping my eighteen percent," I said. "I'll see you at the board."

I handed the microphone back to Niles.

He leaned in close, and his voice dropped where only I could hear it.

"You'll be back at my door in a week. And you'll come in the SUV."

My father pushed through the crowd at the side of the room.

Percy Atwood, silver hair, rimless glasses, my grandfather's gold watch on his wrist.

He didn't look at my eyebrow.

He didn't look at the blood.

"Olivia," he said. "What have you done?"

"I got married, Dad."

"You didn't show up to your own wedding." His voice was low and furious. "Do you know what this does to this family? To the business? You couldn't sit in a car for forty minutes?"

"The car crashed."

"Then you call! You get a taxi! You do not run off and marry the first man who answers the phone!"

Clay's hand on my back went still.

"I was the first man she called, sir," he said. "There's a difference."

My father looked at him.

He'd known Clay since Clay was nine.

"Get in my car, Olivia. You're coming home."

"She's coming home with me," Clay said.

I didn't look back at the head table.

I walked out of the ballroom I'd designed, barefoot, with my mother's pearls in my fist and my husband's hand on my back.

In the Land Rover I finally opened my phone.

The Kenward Hotels account had posted a clip.

It was me on my father's front steps, red-faced, saying, "It's my wedding car."

They'd cut it right there, before the van, before anything.

The caption said, "Wishing our former brand director peace as she takes some time to rest. Some days are overwhelming. #SUVBride"

Two million views.

I scrolled down to the shares.

The third one was a man with silver hair and rimless glasses.

My father had shared it with a caption:

"Heartbreaking."

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