The weight of that knowledge sat heavy on my chest like a bloated hippopotamus.

Desmond was gone.

I groped around on the nightstand until my hand found the smooth, cool, credit-card-sized phone, and I hit the speak button, bringing it to my ear with a cheerful, “What?”

“Hello to you too,” Mercedes replied, not skipping a beat. If anyone was used to being on the receiving end of my upbeat just-woke-up self, it was Cedes. “I suspected you might still be in bed, seeing as…well…days aren’t your thing.” There was a long pause. I didn’t fill it, so she carried on. “The current time is seven forty-five, and I am sitting outside your apartment with Owen, because you are expected at Columbia at eight o’clock sharp.”

I held the phone back and looked at the date. April 28th.

I don’t know how I was the only fucking person in the world who needed to be reminded about my own wedding. But here I was, still in bed two hours before I was supposed to walk down the aisle. I was dreaming about another man and waking up sad because yet another wasn’t beside me in bed.

“I’ll be out in five minutes,” I promised her.

“Don’t fancy yourself up too much, there are people for that.” This was said in a voice eerily similar to Kellen’s, and I couldn’t help but laugh. She wasn’t wrong though, Kimberly was bound to have dozens of the best hair and makeup artists waiting to paint me, pluck me and groom me into the best version of myself.

A version I didn’t feel I deserved to be right then.

I mumbled a “See you soon” and hung up.

Fifteen minutes later I was sitting alongside Kellen, Brigit and Mercedes in short-backed chairs while a team of beauty experts went to town on us. They cooed over Bri’s perfectly straight blonde hair so much I was convinced they wanted to do a scalp transplant and put her hair on my head to save themselves the trouble of making order out of the messy ponytail I’d worn to the hotel.

Eugenia had come along with Kellen and was sitting on a small loveseat looking as uncomfortable as humanly possible. I guess when you take a girl who has lived in the swamps of Louisiana for half her life and throw her into a city like New York, there was bound to be a fair bit of culture shock.

“Eugenia?” I said.

Her attention snapped to me. “Yeah?”

“I don’t want you to feel you have to, but, um…do you want to stand up with me?”

Kimberly, who had been texting up a storm on her BlackBerry, was suddenly all ears. I had to give her points because she didn’t shoot the idea in the foot straightaway and instead waited to hear what we were going to say. Her fingers primed to send another text at any second.

“Oh, I don’t know.” Eugenia was blushing a fierce shade of red. “It’s so last minute, I don’t have anything to wear. I’m sure I’d stick out like a sore thumb.”

I had yet to be a demanding bride, and given how much I suspected Lucas was paying Kimberly, surely finding a single yellow Alfred Angelo bridesmaid’s dress couldn’t be too much to ask. Without a word my gaze drifted from my sister to the frozen wedding planner.

“Kimberly?”

For one long second she just batted her false lashes at me until she registered I was now asking her something. Then she was a flurry of motion and efficiency. “What size are you?” she asked Eugenia.

“I…” The poor girl looked down at her borrowed dress. “This is a six?”

Kimberly didn’t say another word to her, she was too busy tapping away on her BlackBerry muttering, “Sizes run high… Best to get an eight too… Wonder where Nancy got to…” She walked from the room with her head down, and for a moment I was afraid she might run straight into the wall, but the woman was obviously a pro at text-walking because she sidestepped the doorframe at the last second and marched her Manolo-clad feet out into the hall.

“She’s scary,” Eugenia said.

“You think she’s scary? You lived on an island in the swamp populated with feral werewolves and were raised by a witch,” I reminded her.

That got everyone’s attention, including the totally human beauty team, whose curling irons all stopped in unison.

Eugenia’s eyes bugged out.

I winked. “In a manner of speaking.” Then I laughed. “Geez, everyone. Did we not budget for senses of humor?”

My sister let out the breath she was holding, and Brigit joined the prep team in laughing, while Kellen and Mercedes shook their heads, incredulous that I would use two verboten W words in one sentence.

“Oh, honey, we were all raised by witches.” This from my stylist, Carter, whose dark hair was styled into a hip-looking pompadour with the sides shaved short. He had a habit of winking at me in the mirror whenever he spun the chair so I could see his progress. In the grand tradition of male hairstylists everywhere, I found it impossible to determine if he was gay or straight, but I knew I liked him. Otherwise his hands with their black-polished fingernails wouldn’t be allowed anywhere near my hair.

“Are you thinking up or down?” he asked once he’d worked through all the knots of my just-woken bedhead.

“Kimberly wanted up.” I rolled my eyes and shrugged.

“Yeah, well, Kimberly also wants to be Donald Trump’s ninth wife and wants a pony dusted with platinum to bring her a Park Avenue white knight. I asked what you wanted.”

The three other stylists once again stopped dead, this time gawking at Carter instead of me.

Yeah, I really liked him.

“Can you make a ponytail look fancy?”

“Sweetie, I could make a rat tail look fancy. You leave this to me.”

We were almost finished with our hair when the makeup team arrived. By that point Eugenia had been coaxed into a chair and her long dark hair had been transformed into something youthful but elegant. Mercedes’s unruly curls had been softened and turned into sophisticated, old-Hollywood waves. Brigit’s mane had been left long and straight. Her stylist had just backcombed the crown and pinned it back with a sparkly, canary-yellow barrette.

Kellen was the only girl to opt for an updo. As she explained it, “Any opportunity for an updo is a good one.” Braids trailed back from her temples, and a woven gold headband had been pinned in, resulting in a messy Greek-inspired style that made her cheekbones more prominent and her neck appeared longer somehow.

Carter, true to his word, had made my standard ponytail pass as wedding appropriate. He’d tamed my curls and added some sort of pomade that made them look like they were edged with gold. Several small braids were hidden in the mix, each one threaded with gold wire to both strengthen it and make it more beautiful. He’d wrapped the base of the side ponytail with my own hair so there was no tacky elastic in sight.

When hair and makeup were done, Kimberly re-emerged carrying several garment bags.

She took one glance at me and frowned at Carter. “I thought we agreed on an updo?”

“I am at the mercy and whims of the bride,” he replied without skipping a beat.

“Secret?” she asked.

“I forced him.”

Kimberly sighed, clearly bested by our ponytail conspiracy. She hung up the two white garment bags and unzipped them to reveal two identical short yellow chiffon dresses. She pointed to Eugenia. “Let’s get you fitted, please.”

On cue, a frazzled-looking woman with a gray bun entered the room, followed by three hotel porters laden with more dress bags. The smaller ones each bore a label to indicate which of my girls was wearing which, and the porters hung them behind the appropriate women.

The really big one was mine, and the woman with the bun hung it from the closet door.

“Ladies, can we get you dressed, please? The photographer would like everyone dressed before we put Miss McQueen in her gown.” Kimberly was in full-on planner mode. Now was not the time for jokes.

The girls quickly vacated their chairs and took turns in the suite’s bathroom changing into their dresses. Eugenia fit the last-minute size six without any serious pinning or sewing from Nancy the seamstress. Sooner than I would have liked, four yellow-clad women were sitting side by side on the couch sorting out the sunflower and daisy bouquets and commending Kimberly for ordering a “just in case” spare.

It was when Kimberly unzipped the big Kleinfeld bag to reveal my dress that, for lack of a better term, shit got real.

The photographer snapped pictures of the dress hanging in the window, with the curtains parted so the New York skyline glittered in the background.

I swallowed hard. “I’m getting married.”

“Duh,” Brigit offered.

I stared down at the giant diamond on my ring finger and wiggled it off to put it on the opposite hand like I was supposed to, so Lucas would have no trouble slipping the wedding band on.

The wedding band.

“Holy shit,” I whispered. “I’m getting married.”

The girls all looked at each other uneasily, not sure how to respond to this little aha moment I was having. I picked up my phone, checking to see if Lucas had sent me any texts to see how the prep was going.

Nothing.

He was pretty old-fashioned when it came to weddings though. Knowing him, he probably thought texting the bride right before the ceremony was as bad as seeing her. I put the phone back on the vanity then got out of my chair and approached my gown as if it might turn into a monster any second.

My mind was spinning. My tummy churned with nerves while my heart pounded with excitement. I thought about Lucas and remembered the first time I’d been alone with him in the penthouse at Rain Hotel. He’d been so steady, so calm, and yet our nearness to one another threatened to burn us alive from the inside out.

I’d known when we met he was something special, even before I understood the soul-bond. And he had stood by me, steady as a rock. He’d never faltered.

He’d never run away.

My gaze cut to my phone once again, as if Desmond might choose that moment to reach out to me. The message light was blank.