Present - Greg
I was sitting in my brother’s condo, nursing a Jameson and Mountain Dew when I felt my phone vibrate in my pocket. I didn’t bother to pull it out to look because, even if it wasn’t Lilly, it was one of the girls and I didn’t want my ass chewed out today.
I heard the front door open and then close, Max and Chase’s voices drowned out the dull beating of my heart. I swore that this morning, when I would walk into that courthouse, I was going to die with how rapid it was beating. I had tried to prepare myself since the first day in Tessa’s office, but nothing could have prepared me for the knowing that I was breaking Lilly’s heart, something I had never wanted to do, but it had to be done.
“This better be fucking worth it.” Max sat down in the chair next to me. “Alexa has been blowing up my phone all morning and I’m pretty sure she knows that I know.”
“I promise, it will be worth it.” I slapped him on the shoulder.
“Pssh, yeah, not having sex for a whole week doesn’t seem worth it.” Max grabbed for my drink and downed the last of it, coughing up a little, not having realized that it was filled with whiskey. “Fuck, dude, alcohol, already?”
“Trust me.” I ignored his question and stood up from the chair. I looked at Chase and Jack standing in the kitchen. “It will be worth it.”
“So where do we start?” Chase spoke up next.
“We’ve got the church all set up and decorated,” Jack answered.
“I got with my parents last night and let them know what is going on, and I tried to contact Lilly’s family, but only got ahold of her brother, Eric. He said for sure he was going to be there.” I pulled out my phone to check again. As much as I hated Lilly’s family, I had recognized the look on her face when we were in the chapel in Vegas as one of longing. She had always been the woman to want a fairy tale wedding, and I wanted to give that to her. I just needed to make sure she was mine first.
The divorce was never part of the plan, but if I wanted to do this right, I knew I needed to start fresh, so tomorrow I was going to “accidentally” bump into Lilly at Stone Mountain. Max and Chase had already made a plan to get all of the girls there, and I was going to propose to Lilly at the top of the mountain. But it wasn’t like the divorce was real.
When I went to the courthouse this morning, I got in touch with Tessa and Judge Baker to let them know what I had planned. Judge Baker was all for it, and I found out she was a romantic deep down at heart. I had a document already made up that was in all the sense Lilly signing that she loved me and wanted to spend the rest of her life with me, not divorcing me like I knew she would think. I knew she was going to be too upset to even read through it to realize that it wasn’t real. By the way my phone kept going off, I knew my assumption was correct. Which meant that everything was going according to plan.
The rest would happen tomorrow night, with the hope that she said yes when I pulled out the ring, that she would come with me to Helen, where we already had the wedding decorations set up. Pastor Charles had already promised that no one was going to be in there to mess with anything.
“We’ll make sure the girls don’t know anything until after we’ve left the mountain,” Chase piped up.
“And their phones are taken away.” Max leaned over to high-five Chase. All of these guys had been in on this plan for weeks, with us trying to get a wedding dress for Lilly and decorations. Pastor Charles had been great at keeping this secret from everyone so we could have the chapel. All of the business trips I had been on recently were actually for me to come up to Helen anytime I got an order in so that we could place the items in storage. The night that Lilly went rogue from our “business lunch,” the guys and I were picking up Lilly’s wedding dress from the airport. I wanted them to be the first ones first to see it, and then we had headed to Helen and back to drop it off.
When I had opened it in the car, I swore I could have cried. The thought of seeing Lilly walk down the aisle in that gorgeous black lace dress had me almost dropping to my knees a week early to ask her to marry me again.
“The flowers came in this morning, so I think if we head up now, we’ll make it back in time that no one will notice.” Jack grabbed for his jacket hanging on the back of my chair.
“Yeah, that sounds good.” Chase followed him towards the door, but Max stayed behind.
“Hey, man, I’m sorry for being so harsh in the conference room the other day.” Max waited as I grabbed for my jacket on the counter.
“No problem. I knew it was going to be an uncomfortable meeting, but I didn’t realize just how great it would work out until I saw just how pissed Lilly was.” I knew the look on my face was a shit-eating grin, but I didn’t care. When I say we had everything planned, I mean everything. Even down to my asking out April and not telling Lilly.
The guys and I had formulated a plan that night on what I could do to get Lilly to fall more in love with me, and then it came to me. I needed to make her jealous. I hadn’t expected her to retaliate, but I should have seen it coming. That was just who Lilly was, she always acted out when she was upset.
Today I was hyper-aware, trying to figure out exactly what Lilly might be doing at any given minute. I knew this divorce wasn’t going to be something she would just brush off, but I at least made it so that Alexa and Erica were with her, so that she couldn’t do anything too drastic. Chase and Jack’s assistants were running the office, since it wasn’t often that everyone was gone, but it seemed like a wedding was a pretty damn good reason. We had done it for Max’s, so why not mine.
My phone buzzed again as we made our way into Jack’s truck. I decided to take a look this time, and saw that among all of the messages from Erica and Alexa, there was one there from Lilly’s brother.
Come over to the house, please.
He had included an address to what I assumed was his house, even though I had never been there before. Lilly’s parents and Eric were the only ones from her family that still lived in Georgia. Her sisters had moved out of state once they married and Jim just traveled where ever the wind took him. Even though Eric still lived here, after he and his wife had popped out two sets of twins, they never had any more time for Lilly, and I knew that hurt her the most. To have family so close, but to never see them, or have them want to see you.
“Hey, can you drop me off here before you guys head up?” I showed Jack the phone so he could put the address into his navigator.
“You aren’t coming?” Chase questioned.
“Lilly’s brother just messaged me to come over.” I shrugged, not knowing what I was walking into. When Jack finally pulled in front of the house I was shocked beyond words. To call this was a house was an understatement. It was a mansion and I wondered how much money Lilly’s family actually had. I was starting to think this wasn’t Eric’s house.
There was a gate in front of the driveway and I had Jack just drop me off, letting him know that I would get an Uber if I got out of here and they weren’t headed back into town already. I pushed the buzzer and the gate immediately opened. I slipped through when the littlest of a crack would let me and made my way up the winding hill of a driveway.
I was out of breath by the time I reached the top and saw an older man standing in the front doorway. He was braced against a pillar, cigar in hand, with smoke filling the air around him. I righted myself and forced my shoulders back, to make it seem like I was taller than I actually was, because the man I was approaching was for sure not Lilly’s brother and if I had any other guess, it would be her father. And that man stood at least half a foot taller than me.
“Son.” The word was coarse coming from his mouth, but it was a word I smiled at. “Don’t get cocky now, boy.”
He turned to leave me in the dust to follow him inside. When I stepped inside I was more in awe of what I saw. Crisp white walls with gold and silver accents. I felt like I had walked onto an extravagant movie set. There were marble busts of lions at the end of the stairwell that led up to a second and third floor.
“Follow me.” Lilly’s father waited as I looked around and I followed him up the stairs and into a study off the main hallway. The door closed loudly behind me, causing me to jump but having no effect on her father as he took his seat behind his mahogany desk in his giant leather chair. Well, to me it looked giant, but it fit him perfectly.
“Sit.” I followed his command, still not able to say anything yet because I didn’t know what to say. I had thought I was coming here to see Eric, not Lilly’s father.
“You must be Greg.”
“Yes, sir.” I was shocked I could even get the words to come out of my mouth.
“There is no ‘sir’ here.” He waved his hand in the air, moving the smoke that he had just billowed around us out of the way. “Oscar. You call me Oscar.”
“Ok, Oscar.”
He took another long drag of his cigar and continued on.
“So, you’re the man who wants to marry my daughter.” He said it matter of factly.
“Umm,” I sat up in the chair, not sure how ready I was to tell him this. “I’m actually already married to your daughter. We’re having a real ceremony now though. Something she deserves to have, not the Vegas wedding we first had.”
He took another drag, and I hoped he understood what I meant.
“So, you marry my daughter, but don’t have the decency to ask my for permission first.” I cocked my head to the side at the audacity he had to say this to me.
“Excuse me, sir, but if you would had been in your daughter’s life more, I’m pretty sure you would know. I pretty sure you would have been there for Christmas’ and every other damn holiday I have been at for the past five years and seen the way I looked at her, but you weren’t. I was there saving her every time she wanted to come home to see you and your wife but you both went somewhere else instead. I’ve been there through everything, so forgive me for not asking someone who hasn’t been there for permission to marry his daughter.”
I was winded by the time I finished my rant. Oscar sat there wide-eyed with his cigar dangling between his fingers.
“I—”
“Don’t try to deny it.” I stood up from the chair. I wasn’t going to just sit still while Oscar thought he was doing nothing wrong in Lilly’s life. “I’ve seen the messages, heard the phone calls, and seen the tears in her eyes. I won’t let you ruin this for her, for us.”
I held up my hand as he tried again to talk.
“I don’t care if she is the youngest in this family and that you have grandchildren almost the same age as her, I don’t care about the excuses. She’s your daughter and you’ve treated her like she was a nuisance. She might have put up with it for this long, but I won’t let her suffer any longer. As far as I am concerned, we don’t need you in our lives.”
I turned to leave, hand on the door knob to the study when Oscar called my name.
“Greg.” For a moment I thought I heard Lilly in him. The way he pleaded my name to understand where he was coming from, even though he hadn’t said anything. I stayed where I was facing the door, as he continued. “I know I haven’t been there for her, but the moment Eric told me that my little girl was getting married, I made sure both her mother and I made our way home.”
I waited in the silence for him to continue.
“We never expected to have Lilly, and once she was out of the house, I think Mary and I went a little too overboard with the vacations and having the house to ourselves. When you are almost seventy and finally have the house to yourself, you start to get a little crazy with the trips.”
He laughed but I stood stoically still where I was. Lilly wasn’t a laughing matter.
“All things aside, we should have been better parents, but from what I’ve heard, you’ve taken quite good care of my daughter. Got her a place to stay, gave her a job, kept her well entertained and happy. I don’t think I could ever thank you enough for that. For doing what I wasn’t even able to do as a father.”
I turned around just in time to see Oscar wiping away a tear and snuffing out his cigar.
“Please let her know how proud we are of her, and I hope you two have a great wedding.” I wasn’t going to let Oscar get off this easily.
“Oh, no you don’t.” I walked back towards him and leaned over the desk, palms flat on the top. “You’re here, you’re coming to this damn wedding. You will walk your daughter down the aisle as she deserves, and you will give her away to me. After that, I don’t care what you do, but if you do anything, it will be that.”
I pushed off the desk and found my way out of the house by myself. I didn’t need to see anyone else or say anything else because, with those words and the scared look that crossed Oscar’s face, I knew he was going to show up in Helen tomorrow night.
I was going to get to see my girl walk down the aisle with her father, the fairy tale dream I knew she had always wanted but never thought she would have.