"Even centerpieces became arguments."
The committee room looked less like a planning space and more like a florist's storage closet had collided with a wedding planner's fever dream. Buckets of flowers lined one wall, their stems wrapped in dripping plastic that left dark water stains on the hardwood floor. Sample tablecloths were draped across chairs in various stages of consideration—some folded neatly, others abandoned mid-assessment like ghosts of dinner parties past. Someone, probably Americus, had left swatches of ribbon scattered across the long oak table in a rainbow of metallic shades that caught the overhead lighting and threw tiny prisms across the catalogs beneath them.
