With Valentina in hiding from a murderer, her boyfriend assassinated, George being indicted for federal crimes, his startling breakup with Claire, and then Claire being fired by Walter, two plainclothes policemen protecting Sasha, and Abby’s announcing she was leaving in March, and Sasha in June, the mood in the apartment was decidedly somber, despite Claire’s elation about starting her business, Sasha’s over her marriage, and Abby’s film.
Claire showed her mother the sketches she’d been working on since Christmas, and Sarah thought they were very good.
“When are we going to Italy?” her mother asked her, looking excited, and Claire smiled. This was going to be fun.
“Maybe next month, when we have enough designs for our first line. If we go in February, we should have samples by April, in time to take them to a trade show, and take orders for fall.” She knew how it all worked, as she explained the various aspects of the business to her mother, and they made a timeline of what they had to do. It was going to be a lot of work. After they met with the factory, they could establish their price point. Claire wanted to try and keep their prices down, while offering a high-fashion look, and it was going to be a challenge. But she finally had a sense of freedom to do the kind of designs she wanted to do, after being stymied by Walter for years.
As the weeks went by, her portfolio took shape, and she made an appointment at the factory for mid-February. And the week before they left, Morgan was informed there was no evidence that she’d been involved in George’s crimes, and she was free of any suspicion. It was an enormous relief. But they asked her to remain available for future meetings if they needed more information for the federal prosecutor’s case against George.
“To put it bluntly,” Morgan said to Max after the grand jury had cleared her, “George is in deep shit.” She realized now that she had never really known him, or what he was capable of. No one had. He was a classic sociopath, with no conscience about the people he had hurt, just as he didn’t care what he’d done to Claire, setting her up to trust him and believe him, while she lowered her defenses and became vulnerable to him, and then he walked away. Morgan found herself wondering now if he had planned it that way, just to hurt her, and Claire had thought of it too. If so, he was even sicker than they thought.
At the same time, Sasha was staying in touch with Lieutenant O’Rourke about her sister’s situation, but there was no news. He said they were talking to every informant they had, but no one knew anything. At least her sister was safe. But Sasha was tired of looking like a freak, and having two plainclothes cops follow her everywhere.
She and Alex were working harder than ever, and by the time Sarah and Claire left for Italy, they still hadn’t gone to Atlanta so Alex could meet her parents. They never got more than one day off at a time, but they were determined to get there before the wedding. And they hadn’t found a wedding planner either. Sasha had no idea where to look, or who to ask. Oliver finally found one for them, through a client whose daughter had just gotten married, but the wedding had cost a fortune, and she didn’t want to take advantage of her father unreasonably, no matter how nice he was about it.
“It’s a shame Valentina can’t find a decent guy. If you had a double wedding, maybe you could get a group rate,” Oliver teased her one night on the phone. She and Alex were going to meet with the wedding planner the next day. It was nice to be dealing with something pleasant for a change. All they talked about at the apartment now was George’s indictment, and Morgan being cleared. She had decided to keep helping Max with his books at the restaurant, and Max said she was a genius at it. From looking at the spreadsheets, she had spotted that the bartender was skimming money off the top. Max had confronted him with the evidence, the man had admitted it, and Max replaced him immediately. She was still planning to look for a job, but she wanted to regain her balance and composure before going to a headhunter and searching for something on Wall Street. She didn’t feel ready for that yet—what had happened was too shocking, and it was still in the media every day.
Valentina’s boyfriend’s murder, on the other hand, had disappeared without a trace. He was just another gangster who had been killed by his own kind. It had appeared in the paper the day after the murder, and not again. And the article had said that there had been a woman with him, but Valentina wasn’t mentioned by name, by police request, for the benefit of her safety. Sasha still had no idea where she was and hadn’t heard from her. There could be no communication between them, by police demand.
And she and Alex weren’t sure whether to laugh or cry when they met the wedding planner. She was British, her name was Prunella, and she looked more like an undertaker than a wedding planner, in a severe black suit, with her dyed jet-black hair pulled tightly back in a bun. Oliver had said she’d been a ballerina in her youth, but she looked like a prison guard to Alex, and he whispered to Sasha, when the woman left the room briefly, that she scared him to death.
“Maybe she runs a tight ship,” Sasha said hopefully, and she didn’t like her either. But they had no one else. The few they had heard about and checked out cost a fortune, and Prunella was only slightly cheaper. She asked them to describe their dream wedding, and they both agreed that small would be better, and said they wanted about a hundred guests.
“Are you sure?” she asked with a disapproving expression, and they nodded. Alex said that his parents had had a hundred people at theirs. And they had offered to hold the wedding in Chicago, with the reception at the house, but Alex and Sasha agreed that they wanted to be married in New York. “Do you have an idea of location?” she asked them. “You may already be too late for this June, and you may have to wait a year for a prime location.”
“We don’t want to wait a year,” Sasha said firmly, and Prunella raised an eyebrow with an unspoken question. “I’m not pregnant. But we’d like to get married this June,” Sasha said, looking the wedding planner in the eye.
“I’ve had quite a lot of pregnant brides recently,” Prunella said with a sniff. “Modern times. One of them went to the hospital from the reception. Do you want a garden setting? A restaurant? A hotel? Indoor, outdoor? Afternoon? Evening?” The options were dizzying, and they had come to no decisions when they left her home office on East Sixty-eighth Street.
“I can see why people go to Vegas,” Alex said, overwhelmed.
“Maybe we should do it in Chicago,” he said vaguely.
“Our friends are here,” Sasha reminded him. “I don’t want to get married in Atlanta either.”
When Oliver called Sasha to see how they’d liked her, she described the meeting and how unnerving it had been. Then she talked to him about what they should do.
“Nighttime weddings are more fun, and dressier,” he said. “What about someone’s home with a garden? Let me think about it. Do you want a church wedding?”
“Probably.” She liked the garden idea, particularly in June, but she couldn’t think of any, and then Oliver called her back the next day.
“I don’t know if it’s a crazy idea or not, but I know a woman with a beautiful roof garden on her penthouse on Fifth Avenue, overlooking Central Park. I’ve rented it from her before for clients, and she’s very particular about who she rents to. I’m not sure how she’d feel about a wedding. She owns the top two floors, so you wouldn’t have to worry about the neighbors complaining. She let us go pretty late for our event. It wasn’t cheap, but it wasn’t ridiculous either. If you want, I’ll call her, and it’s not like a hotel where it’s booked years in advance. Do you have a date?”
“June fourteenth?” Sasha said hesitantly. It seemed like a good date to her, in warm weather, and before the Fourth of July weekend and people’s summer plans.