My flight landed at 4:00 p.m., so I’d messaged him to pick me up at 5:00. If I knew anything about the Sri Lankan airport, it was that things took time. And in any case, I didn’t want to keep him waiting.

I checked my phone and it was only 4:22 p.m., so I guess I had overestimated the time, but at least the number pattern made me feel a whole lot calmer than I had been most of the way here.

I sent a message to Mahesh—

I just got out of the airport. A little earlier than I thought, but please take your time.

A message beeped back a second later—

C u soon, Akki!

I figured I’d send Beth a message as well—

Just landed. Can’t believe I’m actually doing this!

She replied right away too. I guess I was in luck today.

You got this, babe!

But what have I got, exactly?

A plan A, plan B, and plan C, all increasingly far-fetched and desperate. I’d spent the last few months thinking and rethinking and drawing up various scenarios. If this were a movie, I’d be sitting at my desk with intricately mapped out blueprints and doing my evil villain laugh, but the reality was actually far from it. A lot of antacids, extra CBD oil in my tea to help me calm down, not that it worked, pacing around my apartment so much that I was sure my downstairs neighbors started to hate me. A few notes scribbled in a little notebook I have. Not too many details, of course, but enough to help me keep track of things.

So maybe I didn’t have the best plan. But I did have something better, and that was a purpose. I knew I had to stop this. Any doubts I had slowly dwindled away over the last three months and were steadily replaced by the true gravity of what I had to do. I couldn’t fail. This wedding must not happen.

Kaavi made sure she was keeping all her followers up to date. There had been a flurry of wedding-related posts on her social media. The first was choosing the location—Mount Lavinia Hotel, not as modern as some of the more recently built hotels in Colombo, but a classic, she said. And there’s something so romantic about getting married where my parents did. There had been some pressure, she explained, to just book out an entire island in the Maldives, but they’d eventually decided to stick to good old Colombo so that none of their thousand attendees would be inconvenienced.

The next was picking out the wedding outfits—sari for the traditional Sinhala Poruwa ceremony, followed by a ball gown for the church ceremony the next day, where they would actually be signing the marriage certificate, then a reception dress, and a rose gold going-away outfit because there was no way I could have a wedding without a rose gold sari. Of course she would have four outfits. Everything was being done by Andre, one of the most popular local designers, except for her reception dress, for which she flew to Singapore over a weekend to place a rush order on a Hayley Paige. You know me, my lovelies. I always like to have options for everything except my groom! Who even wears an outfit that costs thousands of dollars rush ordered as their second option?