Genevra got to the church early to be sure she had time to break up the bride and groom before the wedding.
She stood outside the back door, waiting for the bride’s great aunt to show up, smiling at the beautifully made-up and coiffed bride and bridesmaids as they descended in a swarm with their garment bags to finish getting ready in the church hall attached to the main sanctuary. From her first glance, she thought she knew which bridesmaid would be her target for the day. One was radiating spite and jealousy, though at least two others in the crowd were also having an angry day. A little pressure on the right spot and there would be an explosion. Just had to find the leverage.
Finally, a tall, broad-shouldered woman of about eighty approached slowly, leaning on a rollator walker, wearing a purple flowered dress and a sour expression and almost as much spite in her aura as the younger ladies. 
Genevra glanced around and said softly, “Look, I don’t like trying to do this last minute.” 
She’d only met Mrs. Florence Donbey briefly in person the night before and she was even angrier now. Aunt Florence, she reminded herself. Something about her vibe was off. This whole job might be a mistake.
The lady smiled around graying dentures and Genevra couldn’t tell if she looked cruel or merely sarcastic as she girded her loins for battle. She announced in her carrying voice, projecting for the balcony, apparently. “Genevra Donbey! You’ve grown so much since I last saw you. I’m so glad we reconnected and you could come to Yvonne’s wedding after all.”
She’d added Genevra to her family tree as a fourth cousin. If anyone asked too many questions, no one else knew Gen because her father’s father had lost touch. Florence dabbled in genealogy and swore she regularly discussed branches of the family until most of the enormous Donbey clan would make any excuse to get away. Gen had a twinge of sympathy for her, but wasn’t sure it would be enough to keep everyone at bay, having had a lot of experience of being the fake awkward third cousin in the last two years.
“So if this doesn’t work, you’re not going to charge me?” The older lady leaned in, eyes narrowed, the scent of cigarette smoke permeating her whole being. 
Her lungs were wrong. Genevra didn’t have the healing talent and couldn’t see precisely, but she could tell the lady’s lungs might go before she got the double hip replacement she needed. “No matter what happens, I’m not refunding your deposit, which covered my flights and hotel.” 
If everything went well, she could cancel the second night of the hotel reservation and change her flight home to that afternoon, though she wouldn’t get back to her tiny apartment until about two in the morning. The deposit was two hundred dollars over those costs plus a few other incidentals like meals and a cab and the possibility of needing bribes, so even if her client refused to pay more, she’d end up with a small profit. If Florence didn’t refuse to pay, she’d clear the equivalent of two weeks’ wages from her day job. “And I rarely fail. Sometimes families are surprised that their child doesn’t care if their spouse is cheating or whatever, and the couple goes merrily forward and cuts ties with the family instead.”
She’d gone over this in the handbook she’d emailed and in person the evening before. Sometimes the families were wrong about splitting a couple up due to prejudices or bad information, sometimes the kids went ahead and did whatever they wanted, even though they would definitely have regrets later.
Today, though, she had a good feeling and it was going to be easy. Famous last words.
“OK, let’s barge into the bridesmaids’ dressing room and introduce me around. We’ve got two hours until showtime.”
***
Gen was shocked – shocked! – that her first visit to her extended family since she was four had ended in such drama! 
The groom had been caught making out with the bride’s best friend only an hour before the wedding! 
And he’d taken the cash gift from the bride’s uncle meant for a down payment on a condo and lost it by gambling online! 
And he’d made plans for the bride’s ancient, beloved dog to be put down!
Half of the two hundred attendees had gone home out of respect for the bride’s broken heart or because they were close to the groom and chose to slink away, but the rest went on to the reception venue up the road where the food was all paid for. Apparently, the Donbey family wanted to spend time together in spite of the awful circumstances. Genevra rode shotgun in Aunt Florence’s smoke-infused car as the woman crowed about the chaos and glowed with spite.
The open bar the groom’s family were intending to pay for was quickly canceled, though the drink prices were reasonable at the now-cash bar. The beer and wine supplied by the bride's grandfather flowed freely and the DJ agreed to play background music until dinner was over and then see if anyone wanted to dance.
Gen leaned against the wall by the open door, slurping up a big glass of what she was pretending was Long Island Ice Tea but was normal ice tea. The bride was in the room to her right yelling at the wedding photographer who’d taken the make-out picture, demanding to know who’d sent her into the unlit room in the first place. The photographer insisted she’d been looking for a place to test her flash, which was acting up. Gen nodded to herself for a job well done, but it was time to rescue the photographer, who was the messenger, not the cause of the problem.
Mrs. Donbey had publicly grilled the groom about the missing money herself, it being the problem she discovered only three days before which led to her hiring Gen. 
Then Gen used her talent on the best man to get him to blurt out a bad secret. The groom yelled at him, because he was supposed to keep the secret about euthanizing the dog. Gen hadn’t know those were the beans he was going to spill, just that these entitled bros usually knew plenty of bad things about each other. She was expecting something more like the groom cheated at cards or wet the bed until high school, but the dog had been particularly effective.
For now, Gen was acting tipsy and was about to go through the wrong door – oops! – to find the bathroom and rescue the photographer. 
A dark-haired woman about her own age in a bridesmaid’s dress and ballet flats approached with a fake smile and a murky aura of confusion or drunkenness. Maybe Gen wouldn’t have to go in there herself. She focused on the woman’s aura and tugged her toward the bride instead of into the restroom hall. 
The woman stopped in front of her and put her hands on her hips. “Geneva, wasn’t it?”
Close enough. “Yes?”
“I don’t believe you’re related to us at all,” she said. “Who the hell are you?”
“Aunt Florence can explain it much better than I can,” she deflected, slurring slightly and taking another drink through her straw. “My dad, Ted –”
“There is no Ted!” the woman interrupted, stepping closer and dropping her voice. “No Edward or Theodore or any other name that could lead to Ted.”
Her deadbeat dad’s name really was Ted, because it was easier to tell one lie – that her father had been distantly related to the Donbey family – instead of twenty smaller lies. This woman smelled really good and the murkiness was clearing from her vibes. Sadly, not drunk and no longer confused. 
Pretty, though. A little round and curvy and, um, getting angry.
Genevra blinked at her. “But Aunt Florence said –”
The woman snorted. “Yeah, Aunt Flo. Like when you’re on the rag. She’s mean.” Her pain and anger came from some childhood incident, one of those deep, core hurts. “She also decided she’s the only authority on the family genealogy, but her family tree is a fucking mess.”
Genevra smiled. She’d been carefully not calling the lady Aunt Flo, because yes, like having a period. “Doesn’t mean she’s wrong about this, though.” There, that was open-ended enough to not admit to anything and to maybe hint she really was a fourth cousin.
“Always has been mean. You should hear her about how fat my sister is. Loudly in front of everyone at Thanksgiving. Or how stupid my mom was to marry my dad with them both sitting there in church on Christmas Eve. And they’re fucking happy, she just can’t stand that she was wrong about them when they were getting married thirty years ago.”
“I don’t know her motives in inviting me here –”
“You’re a ringer.”
Gen startled. “A what?”
“A ringer. Like a pro baseball player on a community league softball team. You’re not part of this family, you’re not from around here. Who are you, Geneva?”
“Gen-nev-ra,” she accented the last syllable that people had been getting wrong her whole life. She stepped closer to this woman who smelled really good. Not perfume, just whatever flowers had surrounded her today. “And I was invited because Aunt Flo needed backup and because I’m your fourth cousin. Someone who could bear witness and prove she’s not crazy. Turns out she’s not. Fifty thousand bucks. Sleeping with the friend. Killing the dog. Probably a hundred other things, because that’s a nasty shithead who was about to get married today. And Yvonne’s parents were not paying attention and didn’t want to lose their deposits and were going along with it to keep their darling happy. Never mind their little girl was going to get her heart broken a thousand times instead of once.”
And…she was too loud and not acting at all drunk. 
Yvonne, the bride, appeared in the doorway in a flowing blue halter dress she’d probably intended as her going-away outfit, visualizing herself jumping into the limo for the ride to the airport, waving to her enormous family and all her friends. She probably had an entire trousseau of slinky lingerie for the honeymoon, too. She stared daggers at Gen. “My best friend was a particularly low blow.”
Gen literally saw the ball of pain and anger and confusion and, yeah, she hadn’t known how bad it was going to be for this young woman who’d thought she was in love with a great guy and had been humiliated in front of her enormous extended family. She pulsed out vibes, trying to soothe the jagged edges. “I don’t know if anyone’s said it yet, but I’m sorry.”
The bride blinked. “You’re sorry? Did you cause this?”
Sort of. “Of course not. But it’s heartbreaking and life-changing. Maybe for good, though.”
“Oh it’s for the best, is it?” The bride was getting wound up again.
The photographer slipped past and Gen didn’t glance her, so as to not draw attention. She’d probably turned down other weddings and spent hours planning with the bride and her bridesmaids and both mothers, planning to sell a million pictures of this cursed extravaganza and now she was getting away with just her deposit and she didn’t even get any cake for her pains. Gen knew that story.
“Maybe,” Gen said. “Now’s absolutely not the moment to bright side it. Now’s the time to rage and grieve. And do shots. Do you need a shot?” 
Yvonne stared at her. “I don’t see how getting drunk would help.”
“You don’t want to get drunk. But alcohol could temporarily relieve some stress.” She pushed a little clarity toward the bride’s aura.
“He said he only wanted me because my parents are rich and I look like a Stepford Wife,” she blurted out. 
Genevra’s truth-telling spell might have made the groom talk a teensy bit too much during the confrontation. Gen had slipped away after hitting him with it and missed the details. 
Yvonne looked precisely, beautifully perfect before the tears and rage. Even three hours later, her makeup was on point, de-accentuating the Donbey family jawline and the redness of her eyes. 
“Jesus Christ,” Gen breathed. “What a shit.” 
She winced as the bride’s face clouded again. 
“You’re beautiful and you should know it. A rich family can ease the way, but they’re not going to keep handing an asshole money forever. You would’ve figured it out pretty quick when you were short money for your down payment.”
“I had a lucky escape,” the bride said sarcastically and rolled her eyes. “Shots are awful, but I need, like, five glasses of champagne and I need them now.”
She strode off toward the bar, where her brother or maybe a cousin, hot and sexy in his tux with the tie off, grabbed her into a hug.
“How do you do that thing, Genevra?” the dark-haired bridesmaid cousin said.
“Thing?” she answered with fake innocence, sipping her fake booze.
“Where they tell the truth they’re trying to hide.”
This bridesmaid had been right next to the babbling best man and had noticed the magic, which was worrying and intriguing.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
They stared at each other in silence. If Gen didn’t have to fly several hundred miles home so she could make up the work hours she missed on Friday, she’d ask this woman to dance and see if she couldn’t get her number. Or at least get her name. And maybe she’d tell some of her own secrets.
But she shook her head. “I have to get going. I have a plane to catch and have to go get my stuff from the hotel.”
She looked around for Aunt Flo – she really needed to not call her that, even in her head.
The older lady was sitting at a table in the middle of the room, arms crossed over her chest and wearing a smug expression. 
She really was mean, but she was right this time. More relevant to Gen’s needs, she was rich.
Gen crossed the room to say goodbye and confirm payment details. 

​

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