My phone rang and I had to get up, letting out another moan. My skull felt like it was trying to push my brain out the top of my head. I had dropped my purse on my way to the bathroom and I found it in the small hallway. I reached inside and grabbed my phone.
A New York number I didn’t recognize was calling me.
My heart started thudding in time to my headache. It had to be Camden. Because outside of my parents, my employees, and my clients, nobody else had this number. I had created a contact for every number that had ever called me.
I didn’t answer. I brought my phone back to bed and plugged it into the charger since it was nearly dead.
It stopped ringing and I felt oddly disappointed. I wondered if he’d call back.
Ugh. I had to get a grip on myself. This couldn’t happen. I wouldn’t let it. There was too much at stake here. I had people to protect. I did not need to dial the number to see if it was actually him.
When I looked at my missed calls, I saw that the same number had called two other times this morning and I’d managed to sleep through both of them.
Which wasn’t surprising. I could sleep through just about anything. When everyone else complained about not being able to sleep with all the noise in New York, I honestly had no idea what they were talking about. Which also had its disadvantages. There could be a four-alarm fire in my apartment building and I wouldn’t know.
Just like how I had no idea what time Camden had left. What had possessed me to ask him to stay? How had I let everything get so upside down?
I glanced at the time on my phone and realized it was almost noon. I had slept for so long. It was unlike me. I wondered what else I had missed.
As I scrolled through my notifications I saw that one of the missed calls was from Desiree, my employee working for the New Jersey bridezilla. I called her back and quickly determined that things were spiraling out of control there and she wanted to know if I could come to the wedding. They weren’t sure they could manage.
The only way I could swing that would be to get on a red-eye directly after Sadie and Dan’s wedding reception. Once the newlyweds had left for the evening, I’d ask Mandy to help Brandy get back to her room and my responsibilities would be over.
I got on the phone with the airline and had them change around the flights for me and Krista to the new day and time and to have my flight take me directly to Newark instead of JFK.
I texted Krista to let her know about the changes and she sent me back a thumbs-up. It surprised me a bit that she didn’t ask me about last night, and that she didn’t volunteer any information about her own activities. To gush if she’d had a good time or to complain if she hadn’t.
It was very unlike her.
My phone rang again.
“I love the smell of wedding emergencies in the morning,” I muttered.
Only this time, it was my mother. I wondered if she could hear me rolling my eyes over the line. “Hi, Mom.”
“Hi, sweetie. Where are you?”
What kind of question was that? “In my room.”
“With Camden?”
Matricide was still illegal, right? She was making my headache a thousand times worse. “No, Mother. Sheesh.”
“Why not?”
It was actually a shock that I wasn’t more messed up. “Nobody is making you any grandchildren right now.”
She let out a dramatic sound and then said, “That’s a shame.”
I wondered what it was like to have a normal mother. “Mom, I need to get going. I’ve got a lot to do today.”
“Okay. Do you want to say hi to your brothers?”
“Mom, they’re not my—”
The next thing I heard was her three dogs barking at me angrily, still disliking me even thousands of miles away.
I’d never understood why she pushed the dog thing so hard. We lived across the country from each other. It was okay if her dogs weren’t fans of mine. Teddy, Toby, and Tommy were free to be at war with me.
They were her “triplets” because she’d adopted them all on the same day （all different breeds） and she’d given them human names in what I could only guess was some kind of message of her expectations for me. I didn’t have a degree in psychology or anything, but my mother was going to be what doctors commonly described as “deeply disappointed.”
Nor did I understand her infatuation with Camden. I’d gone on real dates with actual men and she’d never been like this. Maybe she was getting desperate and was ready to foist me off on any guy who so much as spoke to me.
At this point I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d started offering them a dowry or something.