Christine poured them each another glass of wine. Outside, snow began to fall, flickering then building at the bottom of the windowpane. Charlotte’s mind whizzed with images of the now-fast-approaching event. Just before Christine poured that third glass, she lifted her phone and dialed Tobias back.
After one ring, she heard his voice filter through. “Charlotte! It’s only been a few hours. Have you made your decision?”
“I have, Tobias. The answer is yes. I’ll be in touch shortly with more details. Let’s get this world-famous celebrity wed.”
Chapter Four
The day before Thanksgiving, Everett sat in limbo in the center of LAX. He had his boots up on his carry-on suitcase; his dark hair was a curly, wild mess; his beard was longer than usual, and his thumb was scanning through the weather report for Martha’s Vineyard for the next few days with vague interest.
Snow. It was going to snow.
And the temperature planned to drop down to single digits.
Great
Everett shoved his phone into his pocket and blinked toward the flight screen. His plane out to Boston was delayed by thirty minutes, then another twenty, and he ached with resentment, mostly toward himself for agreeing to the task-at-hand.
“Sure. I’ll take photographs of Ursula Pennington’s wedding. Whatever. I don’t have anything planned.” This was what he had said to the editor of Wedding Today, one of the ritziest and most sought-after wedding magazines of the era. Photographing big events—like the Oscars, music festivals, and fancy weddings, was something of his bread and butter. In previous weeks, he had been stationed in LA, hopping from one event to another and sending his photographs out for payment.
It had been a fine life. The drinks had flowed; beautiful people had turned to him from every direction, hungry for attention in the form of a flashing camera; and he’d had a killer apartment in Silver Lake that friends had told him was a “steal.”
Still, it had felt so empty, exacerbated by the fact that Everett was in a pretty heavy fight with his mother and brother, who both lived up in Seattle. He dragged out his phone and again read the most recent text from his mother.
Your father wouldn’t have wanted you so far from home on Thanksgiving.
Great. So, she wanted to play the guilt card, too. That was rich, especially after what she had said. See, Jeff, his brother, was every-bit the son his father and mother had planned for. Like their father before him, he was an engineer; he had three children; he’d stayed in Seattle, close to family. Everett had never married; he’d hardly even come close to it. He had allowed his photography career to take him all over the world. He’d had some incredible experiences, and he had met the rich and the famous.
But his mother had insinuated that he didn’t have his life together and that he “wasn’t really happy.”
The happiness part was the worst of it. After all, in Everett’s mind, was anyone ever actually happy? Why did she have to point that out, as a sort of, “I told you so?” It just didn’t seem fair.
If he brought such darkness to the Thanksgiving table, then he would just avoid it altogether.
“Thank you, Ursula Pennington,” he said.
The outlandishly pricey wedding between Ursula Pennington and one of the best basketball players, Orion Thompson, had been announced only two weeks prior. The fact that it was to be held on Martha’s Vineyard at the end of November was the strangest bit of all. People had questions—and Everett? He had a high price for the photos he planned to take.
The woman he had half-dated in Los Angeles the previous month or so had been a bit annoyed at the prospect of his departure. “Why don’t you take me with you?” she had asked. “I work in PR. It would be good for me to see what this is like, especially if it turns into the disaster everyone thinks it will be.”
“I might be back after. I don’t know,” he had told her, hating the fact that he couldn’t commit to yet another woman, to yet another city.
What was wrong with him? Why was he so different than his family? Why couldn’t he find solid ground?
Finally, it was boarding time. Everett stood and waded through the staggering line until he found his seat toward the back of the plane. He stuffed his carry-on in the upper compartment, then leaned back and glanced out the window. The California sun beamed down, never fading.
Now, he was headed toward the snow.
As he waited for the plane to crank up and fly out across the country, Everett thought again of Ursula and Orion, these celebrity millionaires who probably hadn’t sat in the likes of Economy Class in a number of years. He imagined that, for them, deciding to marry one another had been a bit more like, “Well, you’re rich, and I’m rich. Let’s join our rich celebrity forces together, eat caviar and drink champagne for the rest of our days? Or at least as long as it takes for us to get bored with one another and marry the next hot celebrity who comes along.”
When you didn’t have problems, Everett knew that you had to create problems out of thin air.
Up in the air, Everett grabbed his camera from its bag and swiped through a number of the photos he had taken at the celebrity birthday party he’d attended three days before. There were some good shots in there, ones that the “people” would pay to see. He marked the ones he wanted to edit, trashed the bad ones, and then stopped short at the one near the back when apparently he had been a little drunk and snapped a photo of himself in the mirror of the mansion in Beverly Hills.
The man in the photo was now forty-four years old.
He was handsome, sure—he had always been, with that dark black inky hair and the beard, the broad shoulders and his cobalt blue eyes. But he looked
