THE SECOND NO CHAPTER ONE: The Proposal (Six Months Before the Wedding)

 CHAPTER ONE: The Proposal (Six Months Before the Wedding)

 

Maya Torres had planned four hundred and thirty-seven weddings.

 

She knew the exact temperature at which champagne flutes began to sweat—forty-two degrees Fahrenheit. She knew which flowers wilted first under church candelabras—peonies, always the peonies, their petals dropping like tears within three hours. She knew which hotels had loading docks that could accommodate a fifteen-foot wedding cake without scraping the buttercream frosting. She knew, with the cold precision of a battlefield general, that the difference between a "rustic chic" wedding and a "shabby chic" funeral was approximately seven mason jars and a burlap runner.

 

What she did not know, standing in her own kitchen on a Tuesday evening in late October, was how to tell her fiancé that she hated the napkins.

 

"They're *eggshell*, Maya." Leo Chen held up the fabric sample between his thumb and forefinger, squinting at it like it was a questionable lab result. His surgical training made him do that—examine everything with the same clinical detachment he used on patients. "They go with everything. They're neutral. Safe. Reliable."

 

"They go with *nothing*." She pressed her palm flat against the kitchen island, feeling the cool marble ground her rising temper. The counter was imported from Italy, a splurge she had justified because she spent so much time in this kitchen. Now it felt like a stage for her growing frustration. "The tablecloths are ivory. The charger plates are gold. Eggshell is just—it's *dirty* ivory, Leo. It looks like someone smoked a cigarette over them. It looks like a stain pretending to be a color."

 

Leo laughed. That easy, surgical laugh that had charmed her on their first date—a laugh that said *I am calm, I am reasonable, why are you panicking?* It was the laugh of a man who had never once in his life been asked to choose between three shades of white. The laugh of a man who had grown up with a mother who made all his decisions for him, and a career that rewarded decisive action in the operating room but allowed passivity everywhere else.

 

"Babe," he said, dropping the napkin sample onto the counter and wrapping his arms around her waist from behind. His breath was warm against her ear. "I don't care if they're eggshell, ivory, or construction-vest orange. I care that *you* care. So pick the ones you want. I'll write the check. I'll sign whatever form. I'll do whatever you need."

 

It was supposed to be romantic. It was supposed to be *supportive*.

 

Instead, it made something hot and tight coil in Maya's chest. *Pick the ones you want.* As if the problem was her indecision. As if the problem wasn't that she had been making every single decision for six months while he floated through the engagement like a man on a permanent vacation from responsibility. As if her exhaustion wasn't the real issue—her loneliness in this partnership, her growing sense that she was planning a wedding for two people who were only showing up as one.

 

She pulled away gently, busying herself with the kettle. The familiar ritual of making tea—filling the kettle, selecting a mug, choosing a teabag from the ornate wooden box her sister had given her—gave her hands something to do while her mind raced.

 

"The venue called today," she said, keeping her voice light, professional, the voice she used with difficult clients. "They need the final headcount by Friday. Your mother added twelve people to the guest list last week. That puts us at two hundred and thirty-eight. The fire marshal caps the room at two-twenty."

 

Leo frowned, his brow furrowing in that way that made him look boyish and confused. "Can't we just... squeeze? People stand in the back sometimes. I've been to weddings where people stood."

 

"It's a *fire marshal*, Leo. Not a carpool. Not a dinner party. It's a legal regulation. If there's an emergency, that room can't hold more than two hundred and twenty people. We could be fined. We could be liable. And more importantly, I don't want to spend my wedding day worried about whether my guests are going to be burned alive because your mother invited her entire mahjong circle."

 

Leo held up his hands in surrender, backing toward the living room. "Okay, okay. I'll talk to my mom. I'll handle it. I'll tell her we have to cut ten people. I'll handle it this weekend."

 

She wanted to believe him. She wanted to believe that he would actually call his mother, actually tell her *no*, actually choose Maya's sanity over his mother's desire to invite everyone she had ever played bridge with. But she had been engaged to Leo Chen for six months, and she had learned a painful truth: Leo's version of "handling it" meant avoiding it until the problem went away or until someone else solved it for him.

 

This was the man she was marrying.

 

This was the man who had proposed to her on a rooftop in Santorini, down on one knee with the Aegean Sea glittering behind him like a postcard. She had cried. She had said yes without hesitation. She had called her mother, her sister, her three best friends, and screamed into the phone so loudly that a tourist from Ohio had offered her a Xanax.

 

That Maya—the Maya who believed in fairy tales, who believed that love conquered all, who believed that Leo's flaws were just *quirks* that would smooth out after marriage—that Maya felt like a stranger now.

 

Now she was a woman standing in her kitchen, obsessing over napkin colors, wondering if this was what marriage was supposed to feel like: a slow erosion of self, a thousand tiny compromises that felt less like teamwork and more like surrender. A thousand small relinquishments of her own desires, her own opinions, her own identity.

 

She poured her tea, ignored the napkin sample, and went to bed at 9:17 PM.

 

Leo stayed up watching basketball.

 

She fell asleep to the muffled sound of sports commentators arguing about a foul, the rhythm of their voices a lullaby of her growing resentment.

 

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