Well . . . this was new . . .

"Dahyun-ssi?" I said as I knocked softly, yet still with enough intensity to convey proper urgency, on the door. "It's Suzy. Can I help you with anything?"

According to her mom, this was Rule Number One in dealing with this kind of situation: don't project a problem. For instinct, don't ask if anything is wrong unless you are certain something is, and as of right now, I was not. Although a bride locking herself in the waiting room of the church five minutes after the wedding was supposed to begin did not exactly went well.

From the other side of the door,  I heard movement. Then a sniffle. Again, I wish Wooyoung, my mom's partner and the company's appointed bride whisperer, was here instead of me. But he's busy with another crisis involving the groom's mother taking issue with preceding the bride's mom down the aisle, even though everyone knew that was how the etiquette went. Work in the wedding business long enough, however, and you learn that everything has the potential to be a problem, from the happy couple all the way down to napkins. You'll never know.

I cleared my throat. "Dahyun-ssi? Can I bring you some water?"

It wasn't ever the true solution, but a water never hurt: that was another rule of my mom's. Instead of a response, the lock clicked, the door opened. I looked behind me at the stairs, praying I'd see Wooyoung coming, but no, I was still alone. I took a breath, then picked up the water bottle I'd grabbed earlier and stepped inside. Hydration for the win.

Our client Dahyun Kim (soon to be Park), a beautiful girl with a bun, was sitting the floor of the small room, her fluffy white dress bunched around her. It had cost five thousand dollars, a fact I knew because she had told us, repeatedly, during the last ten months of planning this day. I tried not to think about this as I moved quickly, but not too quickly, over to her. ("Never run at a wedding unless someone's life is literally in danger!" I heard my mom say in my head.) I'd just opened the water bottle when I realized she was crying.

"Oh, don't do that." I eased down into what I hoped was a professional knee-bent, taking out a slim pack of tissues from my pocket. "Your makeup looks great. Let's keep it that way, okay?"

Dahyun, one false eyelash already loose - some lies are necessary - just blinked at me, sending tears down her already streaked face. "Can I ask you something?"

No, I thought. Now we were at nine minutes. "Sure," I said out loud.

She took a shuddering breath, the kind that comes when you've been crying awhile, and hard. "Do you . . ." A pause, as another tear spilled, this time taking the loose eyelash with it. "Do you believe that true love can really last forever?"

Now someone was coming up the stairs. From the sound of it - large steps, with a fair amount of huffing and puffing already audible - it wasn't Wooyoung. "True love?"

"Yes." She reached up - No! I thought, too late to stop her - rubbing her hand over her eyes and smearing eyeliner sideways up to her temple. The steps behind us were getting louder; whoever the belonged to would be here soon. Meanwhile, Dahyun was just looking at me, her eyes wide and pleading, as if whatever happened next will happen based on my answer. "Do you?"

I knew she wanted a yes or no, something clear and specific and if this were any other question, I probably could have given it to her. But instead, I just sat there, silent, as I tried to put the image in my head - a boy in a white button-up on a dark beach, laughing, one hand reached out to me - into any kind of words.

"Dahyun Kim!" I heard a voice yelled behind us. A moment later her father, Reverend Jonghyun Kim, appeared. His suit was wrinkled, the shirt loosened, and he had a handkerchief in one hand, which he immediately pressed to his sweaty brow. "What in the world are you doing? People are waiting down there!"

"I'm sorry, Appa," Dahyun cried, and then I saw Wooyoung, finally, climbing the stairs. Just as quickly he disappeared from the view, though, blocked by the reverend's body. "I just got scared."

"Well, get it together," he told her, stepping inside. Clearly out of breath, he paused to breathe before continuing. "I spent thirty thousand nonrefundable dollars of my had-earned money on this wedding. If you don't walk down that aisle right now, I'll marry Jimin myself."

Dahyun burst into fresh tears. As I put my hand on her shoulder and patting her shoulder, Wooyoung managed to squeezed past the reverend and approach us. Calm as always, he didn't look at me, his eyes on only the bride as he bent close to speak in her ear. She whispered a response as he began to move his hand in slow circles on her back, like you do for a angry baby.

I couldn't hear anything that was said, only the reverend still breathing. Other footsteps were audible on the stairs now, most likely bridesmaids, groomsmen, and other coming to check what's wrong. Everyone liked to be part of the story, it seemed. I'd understood this once, but not so much anymore.

Whatever Wooyoung said had made Dahyun smile. That was enough; she let him take her elbow and help her to her feet. While she looked down at her wrinkled dress, trying to shake out the folds, he leaned back into the hallway, beckoning down the stairs. A moment later the makeup artist appeared, with her box of products in hand.

"Okay, everyone, let's give Dahyun a second to freshen up," Wooyoung announced to the room, just as one bridesmaid and then another poked their heads in. "Reverend, can you go tell everyone to take their places? We'll be down in two minutes."

"You'd better be," Jonghyun said, pushing past him to the door, sending bridesmaids scattering in a flash of peach. "Because I am not coming up those stairs again."

"We'll be right outside," Wooyoung told Dahyun, gesturing for me to follow him. I did, pulling the door shut behind us.

"I'm sorry," I said. "That was beyond my skill set."

"You did fine," he told me, pulling out his phone. Without even looking closely, I knew he was firing off a text to my mom in the code they used to ensure both speed and privacy. A second later, I heard a buzz as she wrote back. He scanned the screen, then said, "People are curious but there is a minimum of speculation noise, at least so far. It's going to be fine. We've got the eyelash as an explanation."

I looked at my watch. "An eyelash can take fifteen minutes?"

"It can take an hour, as far as anyone down there knows." He smoothed a wrinkle I couldn't see out his pants, then adjusted his bow tie. "I wouldn't have pegged Dahyun as a cold-feeter. Shows what I know."

"What did she say to you back there?" I asked him.

He was listening to the noises beyond the door, alert, I knew, to the aural distinction between crying and getting makeup done. After a moment, he said, "Oh, she asked about true love." If I believed in it, does it last. Typical stuff pre-ceremony."

"What did you say?"

Now he looked at me, with that cool, confident countenance that made him, along with my mom, the best team in Gwangju wedding business. "I said of course. I couldn't do this job if I didn't. Love is what it's all about."

Wow, I thought. "You really believed that?"

He shuddered. "Oh, God, no."

Just then the door opened, revealing Dahyun, makeup fixed, eyelash in place, dress seemingly perfect. She gave us a nervous smile, and even as I reciprocated I was more aware of Wooyoung, beaming, than my own expression.

"You look beautiful," he said. "Let's do this."

He held out his hand to her and she took it, letting him guide he down the stairs. The makeup lady followed, sighing only loud enough for me to hear, and then I was alone.

Down the church lobby, my mother would be getting the wedding party in position, adjusting straps and lapels, fluffing bouquets, and straightening flower arrangements. I looked back into the waiting room, where only a pile of crumpled tissues now remained. As I hurriedly collected them, I wondered how many other brides had felt the same way in this space, standing on the edge between their present and future, not quite ready to jump. I could sympathize, but only to a point. At least they got to make that choice for themselves. When, instead, it was done for you - well, that was something to really cry about. At any rate, now the organ music was rising, things beginning. I shut the door and headed downstairs.

NOW AND FOR THE LAST TIME

My mom picked up her wine. "I'm going to say seven years. Long enough for a couple of kids and an affair."

"Interesting," Wooyoung replied. holding his own glass and studying it for a moment. Then he said, "I'll give it three. No children. But an amicable parting."

"You think?"

"I just get that feeling. Those feet were awfully cold, and asking about true love?"

My mom considered this. "Point taken. I think you'll win this one. Cheers."

They clinked their glasses and sat back in their chairs, each taking a sip. After every wedding, when the bride, groom, and all the guest left to go home or hotels, my mom and Wooyoung had a tradition. They have a night cap, recap the event, and lay bets on the marriage it produced. Their accuracy in predicting both outcome and duration was strange. And, to be honest, a little unsettling.

To me, though, the real test was departure. There was just something about the moment when everyone gathered to see the bride and groom off. It wasn't like the ceremony, where people were nervous and could hide things, or the reception, which was usually chaotic enough to blur details. With the departure, months of planning were behind them, years of life together ahead. Which was why I'd always made a point of watching their faces so carefully, taking notes of tiredness, tears, or flickers of irritation. I didn't make a bet as much as a wish for them. I always wanted a happy ending for everyone else.

Not that the clients would ever know this. It was the secret finish to what was known in our city of Gwangju as "A Soojung Bae Wedding," an experience so valued by the newly engaged that both a spot on the waitlist and a huge fee were required to even be considered for one. My mom and Wooyoung's price might be high, but they delivered, the results of their work bound four thick, carved leather albums in their office sitting room. Each was packed with images of glowing brides and grooms getting married in every way possible: beachside, while barefoot. Gwangju, in black and white attire. At a winery. On top of a mountain. In their own (gorgeous, styled for the occasion) backyard. There were huge wedding parties and small intimate ones. Many white dresses with trains, and some in other colors and cuts (signs, I'd found, of second or third marriages). The difference between a regular wedding and a Soojung Bae one was similar to the difference between a pet store and a circus. A wedding was just two people getting married. A Soojung Bae Wedding was an experience.

The Dahyun Kim Wedding - it was the company policy that we referred to all planned events by the bride's name, as it is Her Day - was pretty much par for the course for us. The ceremony was at a church, the reception at a nearby hotel ballroom. There were five bridesmaids and five groomsmen, a ring bearer and a flower girl. Their choice of a live band was increasingly rare these days (my mom preferred a DJ: the fewer people to handle, the better) as was the dinner brought out by waiters (carving stations, buffets, and dessert bars had been more popular for years now). The night has wrapped up with fireworks, an increasingly popular request that added a permitting permission but literally a final bang for the client's money. Despite the earlier dramatics, Dahyun had run to the limo holding her husband's hand, flushed and happy, smile wide. They'd been kissing as the door was shut behind them, to the obvious disapproval of the reverend, who had then dabbed his own eyes, his wife patting his arm, as the limo pulled away. Good luck, I'd thought, as the tail lights turned out of sight. May you always have the answers to each other's most important questions.

And then the wedding was over, for them, anyway. Not for us. First, there was this recap and bet,  also a final check of the venue for lost items, misplaced wedding gifts, and passed out or, um, engaged guests (you'd be surprised - I know I always was.) Then we would pack our cars with our clipboards and files, mending kits, double-sided tape, box of tissues, chargers, and head home. We usually had exactly one day to recover, after which we were right back at the office in front of my mom's white board, where she'd circle the next wedding up and it all began again.

Despite how my mom and Wooyoung joked - often - they loved this business. For them, it was a passion, and they were good at it. This had been the case long before I'd been old enough to work with them during the summers. As a child, I'd colored behind my mom's desk while she took meetings with anxious brides about guest lists and seating arrangements. Now I sat alongside them, my own legal pad (in a Soojung Wedding leather folio) in my lap, taking notes. This transition had always been expected, was basically unavoidable. Weddings were the family business, and I was my mom's only family. Unless you counted Wooyoung, which really, we did.

They had met sixteen years earlier, when I was two and my dad had just walked out on us. At the time, my parents had been living in a cabin in the woods about a few miles outside Gwangju. There they raised chickens, had an organic farm, and made their own candles, which they sold at the local farmers' market on weekends. My dad, only twenty-three, had a full beard, rarely wore shoes, and was working on a chapbook of environmentally themed poems that had been in progress since before I'd even been conceived. My mom, a year younger, was full vegan, waited tables in the evenings at a nearby organic cafe, and made rope bracelets blessed with "earth enegry" on the side. They had met in college, at a campus protest against public education system, which was "oppressive, misogynists, cruel to animals, and evil." This was from a flyer I found in a box deep in my mom's closet that held only things she'd kept from this time in her life other than me. Inside, beside the flyer, was a ugly candle, a rope bracelet that had been her "ring" at her own "wedding" (which had taken place in the mud at an outdoor festival, officiated by a friend who signed the marriage certificate as "King Yasss!"), and a single picture of my parents, both barefoot and tan, standing in a garden. I sat on the ground beside my mom's feet, examining a lettuce, completely . My name was a mixed of their own, Soojung and Jiyong. I was Sooji (Suzy).

The box in the closet holding these things was small for someone who had once had such big beliefs, and this always made kind of sad. My mom, however, only reflected this time of her life when clients wondered aloud if it really was worth spending an large amount of money for the wedding of their dreams. "Well, I was married in a mud pit by someone on magic mushrooms," she'd say, "and I think it doomed us from the start. But that's just me." Then she'd pause for a moment, giving the client in front of her enough time to try to imagine Soojung Bae - with her expensive, tailored clothes, perfect hair and makeup, and diamond earrings, ring, and necklace - as some dirty hippie in a bad marriage. They couldn't, but that didn't stop them from signing on the contract's dotted line to make sure they wouldn't meet the same fate. Better safe than sorry.

In truth, the reason for the demise of my parents' marriage was not the mud pit or the officiant, but my dad. After three years in the woods making candles and "writing his poems" (my mom claimed she never once saw him put pen to paper) he'd grown tried of struggling. This wasn't surprising. Raised in Seoul by a father who owned a luxury car dealerships, he'd not exactly been made for living off the land long term. Ever since he and my mom had exchanged vows, his own father told him that if he left the marriage - and, the baby - he'd get a Porsche dealership of his own. My mom already believed that commerce was responsible for all of life's evils. When her true love took this offer, it got personal. Three years later, distanced from us, he died in a car accident. I don't remember my mom crying or even really reacting, although she must have, in some way. Not me. You don't miss what you never knew.

And I knew my mom, and only my mom. Not only did I looked like her - same features, dark hair, and silky white skin - but I sometimes felt like we were the same person. Mostly because she'd been disowned by her own wealthy family around the time of the mud pit marriage, so it was always us. After my dad bailed, she sold the cabin and moved us into Gwangju, where, after moving around jobs, she got a position working at the registry department of Silvers, the houseware company. On the surface, it seemed like a weird fit, as it was hard to find a convention more commerce-driven than weddings. But she had a child to feed, and in her ious life my mom had been a young woman and taken etiquette classes. This world might have disgusted her, but she knew it well. Before long, brides were requesting for her when they came in to pick out china patterns or silverware.

By the time Wooyoung was hired a year later, my mom had a huge following. As she trained him, teaching him all she knew, they became best friends. There in the back of the store, they spent many hours with brides, listening to them talk - and often complain - about their wedding planning. As they learned which vendors were good and which weren't, they began keeping lists of numbers for local florists, caterers, and DJs to recommend. This expanded to advising more and more on specific events, and then planning a few weddings entirely. Meanwhile, over lunch hours and after-work drinks or dinner, they started talking about creating a business. A partnership on paper and a loan from Wooyoung's mother later, they were in business.

My mom had a fifty-one share, Wooyoung forty-nine, and she got her name on the door. But the legalese basically ended there. Whatever a particular wedding was, they were in it together. They made dreams come true, they liked to tell each other and anyone else who would listen, and they weren't wrong. This ability never did cross over to their own love lives, however. My mom had barely dated since splitting with my dad, and she did, she made a point of picking people she knew wouldn't stick around - "to take the guess-work out of it," in her words. Meanwhile, Wooyoung, who had been out since eight years, had yet to meet any man who could come close to a meeting his standards. He dealt with this by also leaning toward relationship potential. Real love didn't exist, they maintained, despite building an entire livelihood based on that illusion. So why waste time looking for it? And besides, they had each other.

Even as child, I knew this was undermined. But unfortunately, I'd been brainwashed from a young age with my mom and Wooyoung's strong cynical views on romance, forever, love, and other terms. It was confusing, to say at the least. On one hand, I lived and breathed the wedding dream, dragged along to ceremonies and venues, privy to meetings on every details from Save the Date cards to cake toppers. But away the clients and the work, there was a repetitive commentary about how it was a sham, no good men really existed, and we were all better off alone. It was no wonder that a few years earlier, when my best friend Gayeon had suddenly gone completely boy-crazy, I'd been relucant to join her. I was only 14 years old with the world-weariness of a bitter midlife divorcee, repeating all the things I'd heard over and over. "Well, he'll only disappoint you, so you should just expect it," I'd say, shaking my head as she texted with some soccer player. Or I'd warn: "Don't give what you're not ready to lose," when she considered, with great drama, whether to confess to a boy that she "liked" him. My classmates might have been flirting either in pairs or big groups, but I stood separate, figuratively and literally, the buzz-kill at the end of every rom-com movie or final chorus of a love song. After all, I'd learned from the best. It wasn't my fault, which didn't make it any less annoying.

But then, last summer, on a hot night, all of that changed. Suddenly, I did believe, at least for a while. The result was heartbreaking, even worse that I had no one to blame for it but myself. If I'd only walked away, said no twice instead of once, went home and left that starry night behind when I had the chance.

Now my mom finished her drink and place her glass aside. "Past midnight," she observed, checking her watch. "Are we ready to go?"

"One last sweep and we will be," Wooyoung replied, standing up and brushing off his suit. As a rule, we all dressed for the event as if we were guests, but modest ones. The goal was to blend in, but not too much. Like everything in this business, a delicate balance. "Suzy, you take the lobby and outside. I'll check here and the bathrooms."

I nodded, then headed across the ballroom, now empty except for the few servers stacking chairs and clearing glasses. The lights were bright overheard, and as I walked I could see petals and crumpled napkins here and there on the floor, along with a few stray glasses and cans. Outside, the lobby was deserted, except or some guy leaning out a half-open door with a cigarette, under a NO SMOKING sign.

I continued out the front doors, where the night felt cool. The parking lot was quiet, no one was around. Or so I thought, until I started walking back and spotted one of  Dahyun's bridesmaids, a tall girl with short hair - Jeonsong? Jeongyeon? - standing by a nearby planter. She had a tissue in her hand and was dabbing at her eyes, and I wondered, not for the first time, what it was about weddings that made everything emotional. It was like tears were contagious.

She looked up suddenly, spotting me. I raised an brow, and she gave me a sad smile, shaking her head: she didn't need my help. There are times when you intervene and times when you don't, and I'd long ago learned the difference. Some people like their sadness out in the open, but the vast majority prefer to cry alone. Unless it was my job, I'd let them.