My Family Stole My Wedding Day, So I Stole His Bride-to-Be novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Date Book
At Sunday dinner Nonna writes Renzo's name over Nico's wedding date, and Nico stands up and leaves. Renzo's bride-to-be follows him to the car and says: take the bride too.
My grandmother opened the family Date Book at the Sunday table and wrote my brother's name over my wedding.
She used the pen with the gold cap, and she pressed hard enough that every cousin in the room heard it scratch.
Thirty of us sat in the long dining room of our family villa, with the first plates of the year still steaming.
The date she wrote was March 14.
My family has one rule that is older than all of us.
The villa can host one big celebration a year, and the first of us to file a claim in Nonna's study on the first Sunday morning gets it.
Everyone else waits until next year.
This was my fifth year of waiting.
Four dates had gone to a christening, a sixtieth birthday, a graduation party and my cousin's second wedding.
This year I had filed at nine thirty, right after the produce delivery, with my hands still smelling of basil.
"Renzo Tessaro and Gemma Ferrante," Nonna Pia read out. "Filed at two minutes past nine."
She looked at me over her glasses.
"Nico, yours came at nine thirty-one."
Nobody said anything.
Then my brother winced and rubbed the back of his neck.
"Nico, I'm sorry," Renzo said. "I'll owe you one. Name it."
He stretched his arm along the back of his chair.
His bride-to-be sat beside him in a grey dress, with her hands folded and her eyes on her water glass.
I had met Gemma Ferrante twice. Her family imports olive oil and had been trying to merge with ours for years.
"Gemma picked it," Renzo said. "She said March 14 was lucky."
Gemma didn't look up.
My father raised his glass from the head of the table.
"To my sons," Gianni said. "A Tessaro wedding in the spring. What more could a father want?"
The aunts clinked glasses.
Under the table, Camilla's hand settled on my knee.
We had been engaged for five years.
Her ring was on her finger, and my name was on nothing.
"Nico, breathe," she whispered. "It's only a year. We'll take next year, I promise."
"You said that last year."
"And I meant it." She squeezed my knee. "I'll talk to your father tomorrow at lunch. He listens to me."
She had lunch with my father every Wednesday. She said it was to plan a wedding we never got to hold.
I looked down the table.
My father was smiling at me, patient and sure I would sit back down.
Renzo was already pouring Gemma more wine.
Nonna had closed the book. She watched me and said nothing, which is what she does when she wants me to decide something myself.
I thought of the venue deposit I had paid in October out of my own pocket.
I thought of the dress Camilla and I had picked out in the spring, and the cake tasting I had cancelled twice for other people's parties.
I thought: I will be thirty in the autumn, and I have spent five years being told to wait by people who love me.
So I stood up.
My chair scraped the floor loud enough to turn every head.
"Nico, sit down," my father said. "Don't make a scene."
"I'm not making one." I folded my napkin and set it on my plate. "I'm leaving."
"Over one date?" Renzo said, and he looked honestly puzzled.
"Over five of them."
Camilla caught my sleeve. "Nico, please. Not in front of everyone."
"You said that last year too."
I pulled my arm free.
I walked out through the front hall past forty years of family photographs and out into the cold.
The gravel crunched under my shoes.
I had my keys in my hand and the car door open when I heard heels behind me.
I thought it was Camilla.
It was Gemma.
She had left her coat inside, and she was walking fast across the gravel in the grey dress.
"You're going to drive away," she said.
"I am."
"Then he wins. He wins the date and he wins the room, and your father picks up his glass and says you were always dramatic."
I stared at her.
She had grey eyes, and she was not smiling, and she did not sound afraid.
"You didn't want his date either," I said.
"I didn't say that." She stopped an arm's length from me. "I'm saying the date is a real date and the church is booked and the Villa will be full of people on the fourteenth of March in their best clothes."
"What are you asking me?"
Gemma glanced back at the lit windows of the house.
"Don't leave," she said. "Take the bride, too."
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