My Ex Hired Me to Ruin Her Sister's Wedding novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Zipper
Jo zips Priya into her wedding dress at the first fitting, and at midnight Priya finds Jo in the bridal suite with the sabotage kit.
My ex-girlfriend paid me twelve thousand dollars in cash to ruin her sister's wedding.
She laid it out on my desk in hundreds, and then she asked if I wanted coffee.
"Make it fall apart, Jo," Cass said. "Quietly. Nobody gets hurt, and nobody finds out it was me."
I run Jo Reyes Events out of a bungalow office in East Austin.
I plan weddings and galas, and for a few clients I have a second job nobody puts on a website.
People hire me when they need an event to go wrong in a way that looks like bad luck.
Cass knew that, and she was the one person in Texas I had never charged for it.
"Your sister's okay with this?" I asked.
"My sister doesn't say no to anyone," Cass said. "That's the problem."
She had not changed in three years, except that her bleached hair was shorter and her eyes were tired.
She had left for Seattle and I had stayed in Austin, and neither of us had fought about it.
I took the money.
Cass told her mother I was a friend who would help coordinate the wedding for free.
The wedding was fourteen days away, the groom was named Dylan Treadwell, and the bride was Cass's little sister, Priya.
I had never met Priya Anand.
She was Cass's family, and she was nothing to me.
We share no blood, no history and no friends, and I had never even seen her photograph.
Then I walked into a bridal shop on South Congress at ten the next morning, and she was standing on a little round platform in a wedding dress.
She was twenty-eight and small, with waist-length black hair and gold-rimmed glasses.
The dress was ivory silk with a low back and forty tiny buttons.
Three women hovered around her with pins in their mouths, and she smiled at every one of them.
It was the smile of someone who has never been allowed to stop.
"This is Jo," her mother said. "Cass's friend, the coordinator."
"Thank you for helping," Priya said.
Her voice was soft, polite, and tired underneath.
Her mother's phone rang, and the seamstresses followed her out, and then it was only the two of us.
"The zipper sticks," Priya said. "Would you mind?"
She turned her back to me.
I stepped onto the platform behind her and took the zipper pull between two fingers.
Her skin showed through the gap, brown and warm, and the tiny hairs at the base of her spine stood up.
I zipped slowly.
My knuckles ran up her back, one bone at a time, and I felt her breathe in under my hand.
I stopped at her shoulder blades.
Neither of us moved.
In the mirror she was looking at my hands, and not at the dress.
"Thank you," Priya said quietly.
"Anytime," I said, and my voice did not sound like mine.
I took my hand off her back.
Where my fingers had been, the skin was pink.
I got out of that shop fast.
That night I had a plan, a seam ripper, and a key.
Her mother had insisted the dress stay at Cedar Hollow Ranch, in the old farmhouse upstairs, so it would not wrinkle in a car.
The ranch sat forty minutes outside town, down a gravel road, under a sky full of stars.
I let myself in at midnight with a canvas tool case.
In it were a seam ripper, thread, a flashlight, and a roll of tape.
The plan was simple and ugly.
I would loosen the stitches in the train, a few inches at a time, so the hem would give way on the aisle.
Nobody would die, and everybody would blame the seamstress.
The bridal suite was a long room with a clawfoot tub, a vanity, and a four-poster bed.
The dress hung in the middle of it in a white bag, glowing in the moonlight.
I unzipped the bag.
I knelt, I clicked on the flashlight, and I put the blade under the first stitch.
"Stop," a voice said behind me.
I looked up.
Priya stood in the doorway in a cream silk slip and bare feet, with her glasses pushed into her hair.
She was holding a ranch key, and she was staring at the seam ripper in my hand.
My whole body went cold, and then, God help me, hot.
"I can explain," I said.
"No," Priya said. "I don't think you can."
She stepped inside and shut the door behind her.
Then she turned the lock, slowly, and I heard it click.
"Who sent you?" she asked.
She walked toward me across the moonlit floor, and she was not afraid.
"Let me guess."
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