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Did my best friend take a softball to the head since I last talked to her?
"What?"
She nods, and without waiting for me to even agree to anything, she starts toward the staircase. It's only when I hesitate she offers an explanation over her shoulder.
"Not everyone's here, yet. And the people that are here, well, most of them are so busy setting up that it's the perfect distraction."
I follow.
We leave the villa behind and cross the wide courtyard across to the main villa, walking past the clipboard man, beneath the Saltillo tile archway, through the grand wooden double doors, and into a foyer more massive than the entirety of my one-bedroom apartment.
"She's upstairs. At the end of the hall. She has a suite to herself. At least, I think she does. I heard chatter that the grandparents were flying over from Italy, and apparently Michael's grandmother is so religious she nearly became a nun. My guess, no,my hope, is that grandma's presence means they won't be sharing a marital bed until after they wedding. This is our best opportunity to get to her."
More confident, I follow Morgan upstairs, though my eyes still nervously glance around every corner. All I see are a handful of servers in uniform scampering about to finish last-minute preparations and a few suited members of the Vertucci family — some sporting tracksuits, some real suits — and one old uncle who has his bedroom door open a crack and is standing around in his very hirsute birthday suit while sucking on a forty and scratching his enormous belly while a soccer game blares from a television on the other end of his room. None of them pay any attention to us.
Morgan's right.
This is our best shot.
We ascend to the top floor and Morgan stops momentarily, shoulders stiffening.
At the end of the hall is a large man with a large shotgun held in a loose grip in his left hand. He does not look friendly.
"Can't stop now," Morgan whispers. "This is for Riley."
We advance, confident. We're bridesmaids and Morgan is the bride's sister and maid of honor, so this wedding is nearly our turf as much as it is anyone else's. At least, that's what I tell myself to keep my heart from exploding out of my chest like some alien Xenomorph.
Morgan comes to a stop just a foot away from the big man and I stand just behind her. She looks up at him with a shocking amount of confidence.
"Move, please. I need to talk to my sister."
The man silently shakes his head.
Morgan doesn't back down.
Instead, she steps closer until her nose is nearly touching the barrel of the shotgun.
"I said move, please. I don't want things to get messy."
Still, he doesn't move.
His jaw and his grip on his gun both tighten and my heart goes from wanting to burst out of my chest to shriveling to the size of a raisin in fear.
He won't move. And if Morgan keeps pushing him, we'll be lucky if we just get kicked out of this wedding instead of getting planted as fertilizer somewhere in the gardens of this palatial property.
“Are you deaf? Move.”
I can feel the tension in the air growing thicker by the second.
The man with the shotgun looks like he's about to snap, and Morgan's stubbornness isn't helping matters. I reach out to grab her arm, to pull her back, but she steps forward instead, her lips so close to the gun she could simply pucker them and kiss it.
"Look, I'm not here to cause trouble," she says, her voice calm, but firm. "I just need to talk to my sister. You might know her. She's the woman who's about to marry your boss. Step aside. Now. It's important."
The man says nothing, but he doesn't move either. I can see the anger in his eyes, the frustration at being ordered around by a young woman, the tension growing in his jaw, the tightening of his fingertip around the trigger of the gun.
"No one enters," he growls. "Move along."
But Morgan doesn't flinch; she just stands there, staring him down.
