“You clocked out at the halfway point and slept through until I parked the car. Look.” He gestured out the window, and I turned and took in the sight of the massive medieval castle that loomed over the surrounding landscape like a sleeping giant.

“Whoa,” Viv said from the backseat. “Now I know why Piper was fine with having us join her wedding weekend. This place is colossal. You could lose somebody in there if you weren’t careful.”

“There are one hundred and twenty rooms,” Andre read from a glossy brochure that featured Waverly Castle on the front. “Five acres of gardens, stables and a man-made lake.”

“I wonder if we could just move in,” I said. “We could keep moving rooms, stay ahead of the cleaning staff, and they’d never even know we were there.”

“In our youth, we absolutely would have tried that,” Viv said. She patted Harry on the shoulder. “Can’t you see the old gang pulling a stunt like that?”

“Sure, except that Dean would have ratted us out to the first adult he saw,” he said.

“And Chester would have eaten all the food in the kitchen,” I said. “He never met a sandwich he didn’t feel the need to consume.”

Viv and Harry laughed, while Andre nodded. He’d heard us discuss our childhood friends before.

“Despite my dislike of the wilderness,” Andre said, “the castle and surrounding countryside will make for some incredible photos.”

He climbed out of the car and we all followed. Harry had parked in the circular drive at the entrance to the massive stone edifice. There were several other cars parked nearby but I paid them no mind as I took in the building before us. Coming from the United States, I was left slack-jawed and wide-eyed because castles were just not the norm there, and I tried to process that people had actually lived and worked and birthed in this place that had been built over one thousand years ago. Mind blown.

There are said to be over four thousand castles in England, and while I could think of several impressive residences in the United States, there wasn’t a smattering of castles across the countryside and definitely nothing as old as this. There just wasn’t.

I wondered again if I could handle getting married in a castle. Now that I was here, staring up at the intimidating structure, it seemed like a no. A White Castle burger joint sure, but this, no, this was too much.

“Viv, darling,” a voice called from the front doors of the castle.

Piper May stood there in another haute couture outfit, this one a pair of multicolored striped capri pants with a bright blue bolero-style jacket over a white silk blouse. She was wearing sandals and hurried down the steps toward us. And by “us,” I mean Viv, because Piper did not seem to care that the rest of us were here.