The last of the champagne-fueled guests had finally wobbled their way to the waiting shuttles, leaving behind a ballroom that looked like the aftermath of a glitter-bomb explosion.
The air, once thrumming with bass and laughter, was now thick with the scent of wilted peonies, spilled wine, and regret. For Willa Grant, this was the quiet hum of a job well done.
Another disaster—a literal, slithering one—averted. Another couple successfully launched into matrimony.
She did a final sweep of the grand room, her sensible flats silent on the marble floor. Her mental checklist was nearly complete.
Florist paid? Check.
Cake vendor tipped? Check.
Drunk Uncle Barry prevented from making a third toast? Double check.
All that was left was to gather her emergency kit and slip out into the cool Napa night.
She considered Caleb Voss, the Vulture of Vows, and felt a familiar prickle of irritation. He’d probably packed up his smirking cynicism and left hours ago, his camera full of enough mortifying footage to last a lifetime.
He was the antithesis of everything she worked for: while she built up, he tore down, documenting every crack in the facade with grim satisfaction.
She’d seen him interviewing a hyperventilating bridesmaid after the snake incident, his expression a careful mask of sympathy that didn’t quite reach his eyes. The man was a predator, and weddings were his hunting ground.
Rounding a corner toward the cloakroom where she’d stashed her bag, she stopped. A single lamp cast a lonely circle of light in the otherwise dim mahogany-paneled library.
Hunched over a small table was Caleb.
He wasn’t smirking now.
His shoulders were tight, his dark hair disheveled from where he’d clearly been dragging his hands through it. One hand was braced against his forehead, the other frantically tapping at the trackpad of his sleek laptop.
A low, guttural curse escaped his lips, sharp and bitter in the stillness.
A wicked little thrill of schadenfreude shot through Willa. Good, she thought.
Hope his camera broke. Hope he filmed the whole ceremony with the lens cap on.
But as she watched, she recognized the particular brand of panic radiating from him. It wasn’t simple frustration.
It was the cold, gut-wrenching terror of a professional who has just lost the one thing they cannot replace. The blood drained from his face, leaving him pale under his perpetual California tan.
He stared at the screen, his jaw set in a line of pure despair.
Willa knew that look. She’d worn it herself once, when a caterer’s van with the wedding cake inside had broken down an hour before the reception.
It was the look of absolute, unmitigated failure.
Against her better judgment, she stepped into the library. “Everything alright, Spielberg?”
He flinched, his head snapping up. His eyes, a surprisingly intense shade of stormy gray, were wide with a distress he couldn’t conceal.
He quickly schooled his features back into their default setting of cool indifference. “Just peachy. Enjoying the victory lap?”
“Something like that,” she said, walking closer. Her gaze fell to his screen, which displayed a terrifyingly familiar error message: `FILE CANNOT BE READ. DATA MAY BE CORRUPT.`
A small mountain of empty memory card cases lay beside the laptop. “That ‘peachy’ look usually means a memory card just ate three hours of someone’s life.”
His facade cracked. He let out a harsh, humorless laugh.
“Three hours? Try the entire ceremony. Vows, first kiss, the walk down the aisle. All of it.”
He gestured helplessly at the screen.
“Gone. The backup card is doing the same thing. Some kind of catastrophic write error.”
The last of Willa’s vengeful glee evaporated, replaced by a wave of unwelcome professional sympathy. She imagined the bride, Melissa, who had been surprisingly sweet despite her mother’s meltdown, finding out she wouldn’t have a video of the most important moment of her life.
She imagined Caleb having to tell her. No matter how much of a cynical jerk he was, nobody deserved that.
“Let me see,” she said, her tone all business.
Caleb looked at her, suspicion warring with desperation in his eyes.
“What are you going to do? Tidy it back to life? Organize its feelings into a color-coded binder?”
The jab stung, but Willa ignored it.
“I’m going to see if I can help you, you ass. Unless you’d rather explain to the bride why you were too proud to accept help from the ‘Happily Ever After Helper.’”
He stared at her for a long moment, his jaw working. The fight seemed to drain out of him, replaced by a weary resignation.
He sighed, scrubbing a hand over his face. “Fine. Be my guest. Can’t get any worse.”
He slid his laptop toward her.
Willa knelt beside the table and unzipped a side pocket of her large tote bag. Caleb watched, a flicker of curiosity in his eyes, as she pulled out not a compact and a lipstick, but a small, Pelican-style hard case.
She clicked it open to reveal a neatly organized bed of foam containing a dizzying array of adapters, dongles, and specialized card readers.
“What the hell is that?” he murmured.
“It’s my ‘Oh, Crap’ kit,” she said, selecting a heavy-duty card reader and a specific USB-C cable.
“You work enough weddings, you learn the universe has a sick sense of humor. You have to be more prepared than it is.”
He just stared as she plugged the corrupted card into her reader and connected it to his machine. Her fingers moved with a practiced confidence, navigating through system files and launching a piece of data recovery software that was clearly not standard-issue.
The air between them shifted. The antagonism faded, replaced by a quiet, shared focus on the glowing screen.
For twenty minutes, the only sounds were the soft clicks of the keyboard and Caleb’s ragged breathing. Willa worked methodically, her brow furrowed in concentration.
He was so close she could smell his cologne—a faint, clean scent of sandalwood and something like ozone, like the air after a storm. She was acutely aware of the warmth of his arm near hers, of the way the lamplight caught the silver threads at his temples.
He wasn’t just a caricature anymore; he was a man in deep, professional trouble.
“You know what you’re doing,” he said, his voice a low rumble. It wasn’t a question.
“My brother’s an IT guy,” she replied, not taking her eyes off the progress bar slowly crawling across the screen. “He taught me a few things. Mostly how to fix problems other people create.”
A hint of a smile touched his lips. “I feel seen.”
The silence that followed was comfortable, companionable even. The software completed its first pass, and a list of recoverable file fragments populated the screen.
A wave of relief washed over Caleb’s face so profound it was almost painful to watch. The tension in his shoulders eased, and he let out a breath he seemed to have been holding for the last half hour.
“I… don’t know what to say,” he stammered, looking at her with a new, unguarded expression.
“You just saved my entire career. Or at least saved me from getting sued into oblivion.”
“Don’t thank me yet. It’s still rebuilding the main file,” she said, initiating the next sequence. “It’ll be another ten minutes.”
He leaned back in his chair, finally looking away from the screen and at her.
“Seriously, though. Why help me? I haven’t exactly been your biggest fan today.”
Willa shrugged, finally meeting his gaze. His eyes were clearer now, the storm in them having passed.
“Because I hate seeing a job go wrong. And because Melissa and Tom don’t deserve to lose those memories just because their videographer had a technical meltdown.”
She paused, then added, “And maybe because I couldn’t bear the thought of you getting any more satisfaction out of a wedding disaster.”
He actually chuckled, a real, warm sound that surprised her.
“Fair enough. I probably deserved that.”
He fell silent for a moment, watching the flickering screen.
“You really believe in all this, don’t you? The white dress, the five-tier cake, the ‘til death do us part’?”
The question was genuine, stripped of his usual sarcasm.
“I believe in my part of it,” she answered honestly.
“I believe that on one of the most stressful, expensive, and emotionally overloaded days of their lives, people deserve to have someone in their corner. Someone to handle the snake, real or metaphorical, so they can have a moment to just… be happy.”
She looked around the empty, chaotic ballroom.
“The rest of it? The giant floral arrangements and the ice sculptures?
That’s just noise. My job is to protect the signal.”
He considered her words, a thoughtful expression on his face. “The signal,” he repeated softly.
“I guess I’ve been so focused on the noise, I forgot it was there.” He gave a self-deprecating shrug.
“This stuff—the weddings—it’s not what I want to be doing.”
“Then why do it?” she asked, genuinely curious.
“It pays well. Incredibly well,” he admitted.
“And it funds the work I actually care about. More important projects.”
He didn’t elaborate, a flicker of the old guard coming back up, but the confession hung in the air between them. He wasn’t just a ghoul feasting on failure; he was a man paying his dues.
The computer chimed, a soft, triumphant sound. A pop-up window declared: `FILE RECOVERY COMPLETE.`
A single, large video file now sat pristine on his desktop.
Caleb stared at it, then back at Willa. The gratitude in his eyes was overwhelming, and for the first time, Willa felt a strange, unexpected flutter in her chest.
“Thank you, Willa,” he said, and her name on his lips sounded different than it had before. Softer.
“You’re welcome, Caleb,” she replied, beginning to pack up her ‘Oh, Crap’ kit.
As she stood up, he stood too. They were left in the quiet, intimate circle of lamplight, the ghosts of the wedding swirling around them.
The professional and personal lines had blurred, just for a moment, leaving something new in their place. It wasn’t friendship, not yet.
But the sharp-edged animosity had been sanded down into a grudging, undeniable respect. He saw her as more than a romantic Pollyanna, and she saw him as more than a cynical vulture.
And in the silent, trashed elegance of the ballroom, that felt like a truce.