My Best Friend Took My Wedding, So I Fed the Whole Town novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Bride Has Changed
At her own rehearsal dinner Sunny watches Birgit hand her wedding to Brynja, cancels every contract in her name, and invites the town to dinner on the harbor.
"Tomorrow at two o'clock we will have a wedding," my fiance's mother said, "and the bride has changed."
She said it into the microphone at the head table of my rehearsal dinner, with her champagne glass lifted.
A hundred and forty people in the lodge dining room stopped chewing.
I was standing by the dessert table with a cake server in my hand.
Beside her sat my maid of honor, my best friend since kindergarten.
She was wearing a white dress.
It was not the bridesmaid dress I had paid for, and it fit her very well.
My fiance was standing next to her chair.
He would not look at me.
"Sunny," he said. "Please don't make this a scene."
"Make what a scene?"
"Brynja's pregnant. Eleven weeks." His voice shook. "It's mine, and I'm going to do the right thing."
Somebody at table six put down a fork.
I looked at my best friend.
She was crying, and she did not stop looking at the tablecloth.
"Five months," I said. "You told me you were at your sister's."
"Sunny, I'm so sorry," Brynja whispered. "I never meant it to happen like this."
"Like what? In a white dress?"
Birgit Lindholm cleared her throat into the microphone.
"We are all adults," she said. "Gunflint Bay is a small town, and a child needs his father's name."
She turned to the room with a gracious little smile.
"The lodge is booked, the cake is made, the band is paid for. We would hate for good food to go to waste."
That was when I understood the rest of it.
She was going to use my wedding.
My lodge, my cake, my band, my caterer, and all thirty-one thousand four hundred dollars I had put down from my father's life insurance and the sale of his boat.
She expected me to hand it over, because it would be rude to make a fuss.
I could feel every person in the room waiting to see how nicely I would take it.
In the back, by the door, a tall man in a flannel shirt stood with his arms folded.
Lasse Koskela, who ran the smokehouse on the harbor, had come in for a plate of food and stayed to watch.
He had been the one standing there, eighteen months ago, when Torvald Lindholm held out his hand for the keys to my father's boat shop.
I looked away from him.
I set down the cake server, and I picked up the microphone from the dessert table, the one the band was supposed to use.
"Everybody, I'm going to say this once," I said.
My voice came out low and level, and I was glad of it.
"Every contract for tomorrow is in my name. The lodge, the caterer, the band, the cake, the flowers, the church hall. I signed all of them. I paid all of them."
"Sunny," Eirik said.
"So the wedding is cancelled."
A woman by the window let out a small, startled laugh and covered her mouth.
Birgit's smile held on for a moment longer than her face did.
"You can't just cancel, Sunniva Fjeld," she said. "The deposits are not refundable."
"They're not refundable to me. They're also not transferable to you. I read the contracts. I'm the only name on them."
The lodge owner, standing by the kitchen door, nodded slowly.
I looked at the caterer's three servers, who were holding trays of beef and wild rice, and I felt a hot pang for them.
"Nobody here did anything wrong except four people," I said. "Please eat. This dinner is already paid for."
I took a breath.
"But tomorrow there will be no wedding at the lodge, and no wedding at the church."
"And what will you do with all that food?" Birgit asked.
She meant it to sound like a challenge.
I thought about the caterer's order, which fed two hundred.
I thought about the harbor at five o'clock, with the sun going down over the water and nowhere for anybody to sit.
"I'll feed the town," I said. "On the harbor dock, at five o'clock tomorrow. Anyone who wants a plate is welcome."
The whole room had gone completely quiet.
I handed the microphone to the lodge owner, and I took off my engagement ring and set it in the dish of cake mints.
"Everyone is welcome," I said. "Not them."
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