The Wedding We Were Paid to Ruin

How it begins

Cora was paid to make the best man's microphone fail on the word forever.

She read the instruction three times.

Then she unplugged nothing.

At the back of the ballroom, a man in a dark linen jacket was measuring the distance between the flower arch and the fire exit. He looked like the person most likely to appreciate an unreasonable request.

“Do you work here?”

“Depends which part is currently going wrong.”

She showed him the message.

He read it without surprise.

“Interesting.”

“Is it?”

He held out his own phone.

Move the cake before the first dance. Do not ask the bride.

Cora looked across the room. The bride sat on a low stage in trainers, eating toast while somebody adjusted the hem of her dress. Beside her, the groom was laughing at a video on the photographer's camera.

They looked inconveniently happy.

“Who hired you?” Cora asked.

“The family office.”

“Which family?”

He paused.

“Apparently the other one.”

His name was Ivo Marsh. He solved event problems for people who preferred not to know they had any. Cora recognized the profession's unofficial rule: the more polite the instruction, the more carefully it should be examined.

A florist passed carrying a centerpiece large enough to conceal an argument.

Cora and Ivo moved aside together.

“We could ask them,” she said, nodding toward the couple.

“We could lose the commission.”

“We could also do the job we thought we accepted.”

He smiled, briefly and without calculation.

Cora found this more distracting than it deserved to be.

Onstage, the bride caught her looking and waved them over.

Ivo put his phone away.

“Together?”

“For the explanation.”

“Of course.”

They crossed the ballroom, stepping around the cables Cora had secured that morning.

She had spent years making voices sound effortless.

This conversation, she suspected, would require them to say exactly who wanted whose voice to disappear.