Chapter One
Hazel's POV
I was the most in-demand wedding planner in Boston. I'd run more than three hundred weddings, and not one of them had ever been off by a single second.
The only wedding I couldn't pull off was my own.
My fiancé, Graham, and I had been together for seven years, and everyone knew he was a perfectionist.
Everyone called his executive assistant, Sloane, Miss Punctual. She was also my best friend.
In Graham's eyes, Sloane was the gold standard, and I never measured up.
At our engagement party, I showed up one song late, and the first dance went to him and Sloane.
On Thanksgiving, I walked in two minutes late, and Sloane was already sitting in the seat saved for me next to his parents.
For the charter flight to Aspen, I was thirty seconds too late to board. The door closed right in my face, and Sloane flew off with her head on his shoulder.
We'd tried to get married seventeen times. Every single time, he stopped it halfway through and had Sloane stand in for me to finish the run-through.
For the eighteenth, I had all four screens in the ballroom running a synced countdown, and I'd practiced at home with a stopwatch for over two hundred nights.
But two seconds before I was supposed to say my vows, Sloane beat me to it and blurted out "I do."
Graham didn't even look at the screens. He just turned to me and said, "You're late again. The wedding's off."
That was when I finally got it. My timing had never been the problem. The problem was that the wrong woman was standing across from him.
He took Sloane's hand. "Watch closely. We'll show you one more time."
I took out the two wedding rings and slid one onto his finger and the other onto hers.
"Don't bother. Here's to your happily ever after."
"That's not in the script. Cut it."
The moment Graham spoke, the whispering in the ballroom stopped.
He gave me a look, the kind you'd give an employee who edited a document without asking.
My eyes started to sting.
Even now, he thought I was just helping him rehearse. To him, everything I said was just another line in a file he could delete whenever he wanted.
And that line was far from the first thing he'd deleted.
The tulips I'd spent six months picking out got swapped for the white roses Sloane liked.
My maid of honor was supposed to be the friend I grew up with. He went and asked one of Sloane's coworkers instead.
I'd stayed up for nights hand-drawing our invitations. The ones that actually got printed were the gold-foil design Sloane chose.
I'd fought for so many brides to get the flowers and vows they wanted, but when it was my turn, I couldn't even hold onto a bunch of tulips.
Every time I pushed back, he gave me the same answer. Sloane's taste was a better fit for the wedding he wanted.
He was always going on about perfection. He could throw out everything I liked, but somehow he'd let Sloane's mistakes slide.
When Sloane saw me standing there frozen, she came over with a big smile to smooth things over.
"Oh, come on, don't be such a stickler. Hazel means well. Honestly, I think her little well-wish makes the whole thing even sweeter. Don't you?"
I was about to tell her not to waste her breath. Once Graham made up his mind, he never changed it.
But he only looked at her for two seconds before he caved. "Fine. We'll keep it."
I clutched my skirt. My chest felt so tight it hurt.
It wasn't like I hadn't fought him over the past seven years. He just never let me win. Not once.
Our worst fight was over the locket my mom left me.
Inside was a photo of my parents when they were young. I wanted to wear it down the aisle so they could watch me walk in, even if it was only through that picture.
I tried reasoning with him. I cried. I slammed doors. All he ever said was, "That necklace doesn't go with the look."
Later I wound it into the ribbon on my bouquet, hoping I could sneak it past him. He caught the chain glinting and stopped everything in front of all the guests.
All told, he called off five weddings over that necklace, until I finally locked it in a drawer myself and never took it out again.
No matter how hard I fought, I could never get him to budge on a single rule. Sloane got him to bend with one sentence.
His principles were never set in stone. He just wouldn't bend them for me.
When I snapped out of it, the confetti cannons were going off right on cue.
Graham slipped an arm around Sloane's waist, and the second the confetti came down, he pulled off a perfectly angled stage kiss.
The room broke into applause. Someone whistled.
"Graham, the whole company knows who you really want. You throw one of these every few months just to show off in front of us, huh?"
"You've done this stand-in bride bit eighteen times now. Can you guys get some new material?"
Graham didn't say anything, but he couldn't stop smiling.
He let the whole off-script circus play out, and he let everyone treat me as the joke of the show, the bride who got swapped out eighteen times.
I looked out at the guests.
His investors and board members sat up front. In the back were Sloane's aunt and uncle and a whole crowd of her cousins.
My family and friends had stopped coming after the third year. None of them wanted to keep sitting there watching me get humiliated.
So in that entire room, not one person saw me as the bride.
I'd planned weddings for over three hundred couples and never let a single one of them get embarrassed up there. And somehow I'd turned my own wedding into everyone else's punchline.
Seven years. Eighteen weddings. I'd spent every second of it marching to his beat.
But what Graham didn't know was that even someone who'd played the supporting role for seven years would hit a breaking point one day. This time I wasn't going to wait for him to call it. I was going to walk off that stage myself.
