Chapter 3: What Was on the Phone
Mavis turned the screen face-down against her palm.
Too fast.
Too deliberate.
Ryan noticed.
"Who was that?"
"Nobody." She picked up her bag from the chair.
"I need some air."
"Mom."
She stopped at the kitchen doorway but didn't turn around.
"It was nobody, Ryan.
I'll be in the car."
The back door closed behind her.
Not a slam.
Something quieter than a slam, which somehow felt worse.
Ryan looked at me.
I looked at the wet envelopes still spread across the table between us.
"She's hiding something," I said.
"I know."
He didn't say it like it was new information.
I pulled out a chair and sat down.
"Ryan.
How long have you known?"
He was quiet for a moment.
He picked up one of the ruined envelopes, turned it over, set it back down.
"There's something I should have told you two months ago," he said.
"I kept thinking it would sort itself out."
"Tell me now."
He sat across from me.
Folded his hands on the table the way he does when something is difficult.
"Before we got engaged, my mother went to see your parents."
I stared at him.
"She what?"
"She drove to their house.
Without telling me.
Without telling you." He met my eyes.
"She told your mother that you weren't right for me.
That the family wasn't — her word — suitable."
The kitchen was very quiet.
"My mother never said anything to me about that."
"I know.
Because your mother told her to leave and never come back." A faint, sad pull at the corner of his mouth.
"Your mother called me that same evening.
She made me promise not to tell you because she didn't want it to affect our relationship.
She said, and I'm quoting her exactly — 'That woman is Ryan's problem to manage, not your daughter's.'"
I sat with that for a moment.
My mother.
Who had smiled at Mavis across every dinner table for the past year.
Who had passed her the bread basket and asked about her garden and laughed at her stories.
Carrying that the whole time.
"She visited them," I said.
"To tell them I wasn't suitable."
"Yes."
"And then she destroyed ninety-six invitations because she lost the argument."
Ryan didn't answer.
He didn't need to.
I stood up and walked to the window.
Mavis was in the driveway, standing beside the car with her phone pressed to her ear.
Whoever she was calling, she had her back to the house.
"Who is she calling?"
Ryan came to stand beside me.
We watched her for a moment.
Her free hand moved while she talked — quick, sharp gestures.
Whatever the conversation was, it wasn't calm.
"I don't know," he said.
"But I'm going to find out."
He was already reaching for his own phone when mine rang first.
It was my mother.
I answered it.
"Mom—"
"Sweetheart." Her voice was careful.
Measured in a way that meant she already knew something.
"I just received a very interesting phone call from a woman I hoped never to hear from again."
My eyes went to Mavis in the driveway, still talking, still turned away.
"What did she say?"
"She told me," my mother said slowly, "that if you go ahead with this wedding, she will make sure certain information reaches Ryan before the ceremony."
My stomach dropped.
"What information?"
A pause.
Long enough to feel like a warning.
"She says she knows something about you, Lauren.
Something she claims Ryan doesn't know." My mother's voice stayed steady, but I could hear what was underneath it.
"She wouldn't tell me what it was.
She just said you would know."
I gripped the edge of the counter.
Mavis turned around in the driveway.
May you like
She looked directly at the kitchen window.
And she smiled.
