than Paige was. To have a finished product to show her would probably do a lot to relieve some of the wedding tension Paige was feeling. She got along with her Mom. Most of the time, anyway. But they’d definitely had it out over more than a few wedding details. “I’m so glad. I didn’t want to push you, but man, Mom’s been driving me crazy over this dress.”
“She’s here through next Thursday, right?”
“Yeah, but her flight is super early Thursday morning, so it’ll have to be on Wednesday.”
Five days. I looked back at the dress. “I can finish in five days.”
Paige gave me a hug, squeezing extra hard before letting me go. “Alex is stupid, Dani,” she said, her voice close to my ear. “Don’t even give him another thought.”
Chapter Eight
Alex
“How long has it been?” Isaac leaned forward, stretching his arms far over his head.
I closed out the book I was reading on my phone and looked at the clock. “Three hours,” I said. “We’ve now officially been on the airplane on the ground, twice as long as we will be in the air. If,” I added, “we ever leave the ground.” The flight crew had cited ambiguous “delays” and a backlog of planes trying to leave JFK, but three hours? I’d done a lot of flying over the years and had never waited so long before takeoff.
Isaac groaned. “I think Charleston is going to sink into the ocean before we make it home.”
“Probably not,” I answered dryly. “But you aren’t going to be home in time to film. Did you leave anything for Tyler to post?”
He scrubbed his hands across his face. “No. I thought I’d be home in time.”
“Can he do it without you?”
He pursed his lips. “Most of it, yeah. But also . . .” His voice trailed off as he looked around the plane. “I think I’ll do a little something from here, too.”
“From the plane? Can you do that?”
“Why not? I’ll talk to a few people, do some trivia, then we can send the footage back to the studio and Vinnie can splice it in with Steven’s tech news stuff. I mean, look around. Everybody’s bored. This will be fun.”
For the next thirty minutes, I watched in awe as Isaac morphed into a full-scale entertainer. All he did was talk to people, ask them questions, play a few random trivia games. But he had a way of engaging people that was unparalleled. My part was easy. I simply followed behind him with a digital consent agreement I’d worked up on the fly and made sure everyone who appeared on video signed it and gave us rights to publish.
It was fascinating seeing Isaac in his element. I’d watched his show, and the process of filming and production countless times, but this was different. Isaac was interacting with people—many of whom knew who he was and seemed very excited for the interaction—face-to-face. It brought him to life in a way that his studio stuff didn’t quite capture.
“You’re good at that,” I told him, as he prepped the video to send to Vinnie.
“What? Talking to people?”
“Yes,” I said. “A lot of people should have been annoyed by you shoving a camera in their faces, but somehow you charmed them all into complicity. It was pretty impressive.”
He smiled. “It’s not something they teach in the Ivy Leagues, huh?”
“Even when I’m paying you a compliment, you can’t stop making fun of my education, can you?”
He chuckled. “I appreciate your education. Someone has to keep the doors open at Harvard, otherwise, who would I make fun of?”
“Is it just the Ivy League you dog on, or, would you, I don’t know, make fun of an MIT grad too?”
He shot me a knowing look. “You’ve been talking to Dani.”
“You forced me to talk to Dani.”
“Whatever. I saw the way you looked at her at dinner. Don’t tell me you weren’t enjoying yourself.”
I leaned back into my seat. I had enjoyed her company. But there were so many complications. My phone buzzed with an incoming call; I was happy for the distraction until I glanced at the screen and saw my stepbrother’s name across the top.
Speaking of complications.
I thought of Gabriel’s warning earlier that week that Victor might try and tell me not to come to the wedding. I silenced the call. If there was anything truly urgent, Gabriel would have mentioned it when he saw me in person.
The voicemail notification popped up at the same time the pilot’s voice sounded throughout