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Back on the monitors, I saw something that made me sit up straighter.
Mrs. Ashford was talking to a man I didn’t recognize. He wasn’t part of my regular staff—no uniform, no name tag, just a nondescript suit and nervous posture. She was holding something small and rectangular in her hand. Cash.
She pressed it into his palm.
He nodded quickly, glanced around, and headed toward the service hallway that led back to my kitchen and AV room.
I rewound the camera feed by five minutes and watched their interaction in full. The audio was faint, but body language was a language I was fluent in. Her lips were tight. Her fingers pointed toward the DJ booth, the speakers, the head table. His shoulders hunched, his head bobbing like a dashboard ornament.
Whatever she was planning, it wasn’t about napkins.
I grabbed my phone and called my head of security.
“Keep an eye on the man in the gray suit who just came through the south entrance,” I said. “He took cash from Mrs. Ashford. Don’t intervene yet. Just watch him and back up every feed in that room.”
“Yes, Ms. Wong,” he said. “Already on it.”
I set the phone down, looked at my reflection in the dark screens between feeds, and picked up the apron I’d tossed on my chair.
If Mrs. Ashford wanted to play games in my house, she was about to learn one simple truth.
The house always wins.
I rode the executive elevator back down, slipped into the service hallway, grabbed a tray of champagne from a passing runner, and pushed through the side door into the ballroom.
The change was instant.
One second I was in a narrow corridor lined with brooms and racks of glassware; the next, I stepped into a glittering world of chandeliers, white tablecloths, blush-pink flowers, and so many candles it looked like a movie set for a luxury wedding drama.
Madison had gone for what I could only describe as Kardashian meets Downton Abbey. Crystal chandeliers hung from the ceiling, fighting for attention with LED uplighting that painted the walls in soft gold. Towering floral centerpieces made it impossible to see the person across some tables. Underneath it all, the faint hum of Chicago traffic outside, muffled and distant.
The Ashfords stood in the middle like they owned the place.
They didn’t.
Their son Brett—broad-shouldered, square-jawed, the kind of handsome you’d find in a catalog for suits—stood between his parents with the expression of a man being slowly strangled by his own bow tie. He smiled when people approached, but his eyes looked like they were calculating escape routes.
I moved through the crowd, tray held high, invisible in that special way that service workers are trained into invisibility at expensive events. People took champagne flutes from me without looking at my face, already turning back to conversations about hedge funds, real estate, and vacation homes on the East Coast.
“Good help is just impossible to find these days,” Mrs. Ashford was saying when I approached. “Our place in Connecticut used to run like a dream. Now, between staff and standards, it’s like the world has forgotten how to take pride in anything.”
The irony of her saying that while taking a glass from my tray without even glancing at me was almost art.
Her husband nodded, though his eyes flicked quickly toward the bar, the exits, the massive projection screens showing a slideshow of Madison and Brett’s engagement photos in various picture-perfect American locations—Central Park, a vineyard in Napa, a rooftop terrace looking out over the New York skyline.
Then I heard it.
The sentence that snapped everything else into sharp focus.
“We’ll need to sit down and discuss the financial arrangements soon,” Mrs. Ashford said smoothly to Madison. “Of course, your family will be contributing to Brett’s investment portfolio. It’s only fair, considering the kind of life you’ll both be leading. I understand your sister is a very successful investor.”
Her tone was light, but I’d sat across from too many people like her in boardrooms to miss the pressure under the sugar.
Madison’s eyes flicked, just for a second, toward the crowd.
“My sister’s doing incredibly well,” she said quickly. “She’s… quiet about it, but she has an online company. She invests. She’ll definitely want to support us.”
I nearly tipped the tray.
My sister, who had redirected me to the service entrance and giggled about “these people,” had just turned me into her imaginary walking checkbook.
I moved on before my face could give me away.
At the service station, while a bartender refilled the champagne bottles, Brett’s brother slid in next to me.
Chase.
Of course that was his name.
He looked like every trust fund cliché rolled into one: slicked-back hair, expensive watch, confident slouch. He leaned in, bringing with him a cloud of cologne and entitlement.
“Hey,” he said, eyes flicking down my apron. “You working this whole thing, or do you get breaks?”
“I’ll be working until the job is done,” I said.
He smiled like we were sharing some private joke.
“Well, if you want to make some real money later,” he murmured, slipping a folded bill onto my tray, “find me. I’m actually in crypto. I change people’s lives.”
Crypto had crashed three months ago. If he was still “in crypto,” the only thing he was changing was how many calls he was ignoring from creditors.
The bile rose in my throat, but I swallowed it and walked away, adding him to my growing list of reasons this night was going to be interesting.
During a lull, I slipped into the business center off the main ballroom, closed the door, and pulled out my phone. Fingers flying over the screen, I ran a few quick searches, pinged a contact in banking, and called someone who owed me a favor in Connecticut.
It didn’t take long.
The Ashfords weren’t just cash-poor. They were disaster-level broke.
Three mortgages on the family estate. Investment accounts drained two years ago. Liens filed. Lawsuits pending. Their “legacy property” had more paper filed against it than some small businesses.
Suddenly, everything locked into place.
They weren’t trying to stop the wedding because Madison wasn’t good enough.
They were desperate for the wedding to happen because they thought Madison’s family had money.
The “financial arrangements” Mrs. Ashford wanted weren’t about combining two great American families.
They were looking for a bailout.
I went back to the ballroom, tray in hand, but now my attention sharpened to a razor’s edge. Every time Mrs. Ashford opened her mouth, I listened. Every time Madison laughed a little too loudly or tossed her hair a little too hard, I watched.
The noise level climbed as more drinks flowed. The man in the gray suit—the one she’d bribed earlier—was near the sound system now. I watched him palm a small USB drive and bend down to plug it into the equipment.
Whatever sabotage she’d ordered was about to happen.
At the same time, I saw David, my general manager, appear at the ballroom entrance. He was in his usual uniform: navy suit, calm expression, eyes scanning everything. In his hand, he held a dark folder.
I knew that folder.
The Ashfords’ check had bounced.
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