Abby, Get Your Groom!. Victoria Pade

Glassman’s daughter,” Dylan contributed. His cousin Cade had just told him over lunch—after Dylan’s profuse apologies to Cade and Cade’s wife, Nati. “But you can’t be thinking that Lindie could find a way to make amends to her in the middle of this sprint to her wedding!”

      “What I was thinking,” GiGi said to him with that putting-him-in-his-place tone that he recognized well, “is that if we could get this group to do the wedding, the girls might all get their hair done the way they want and in the process we’d be establishing contact with Abby Crane.”

      Mellowing her tone, GiGi included Lindie again as she went on. “According to the chaplain, Gus Glassman made sure his daughter wouldn’t know who her father was, or anything about where she came from. All he left her with was a blanket and a note saying her name was Abby. But I have learned that she grew up in foster care, moved around from home to home—”

      “No telling how happy or unhappy that might have left her,” Dylan interjected. “She could be a pretty tough cookie. So let me do it. That’s why I came by—Cade told me about what you’d found out. And I should be who does this project.”

      “You want your hair, makeup and nails done for the wedding?” Lindie goaded him.

      “I could start with a haircut to get my foot in the door so I can tell her who she is,” he suggested.

      “But we also need someone to do wedding hair,” GiGi reasoned. “That’s two birds with one stone.”

      “And I’m in charge of security for the wedding—and security for everything leading up to it—and trying to keep the circus that’s developed around this to a minimum,” Dylan reminded her. The task was a natural fit for him, given his usual position as head of all Camden business security.

      Lindie had met her fiancé, Sawyer Huffman, only a little over a month ago when GiGi had sent her on her own make-amends mission.

      But Sawyer Huffman had made a career out of mounting very public opposition to every Camden Superstore being opened in the country. So when word had leaked that these two adversaries were coming together—coupled with the fact that any Camden major life event drew the media—it had caused a flurry of attention that was complicating the already problematical planning of a big wedding in a month’s time. A month’s time when they’d begun. Now the wedding was just over a week away.

      “In order to have people outside of Camden Superstores doing anything with this wedding I need to find out if this woman can be discreet,” Dylan reasoned. “I need to check out the salon to see if you girls can go in and get what you need done without photographers taking everyone’s pictures through the windows—”

      “And you do need a haircut before the wedding,” GiGi commented.

      “So give me this make-amends mission and I can start with a haircut. That’ll get me in the door. Then I can approach Abby Crane about doing the wedding and to tell her that I know who she is. After twenty-eight years this shouldn’t wait any longer. It has to be one of the worst things we’ve learned about what was done in the past,” Dylan finished.

      Both Lindie and GiGi sobered noticeably. It was clear to see they agreed.

      “So let me take care of it,” Dylan reiterated.

      For a moment neither Lindie nor GiGi said anything.

      Dylan wasn’t sure whether that was due to the weight of what had happened twenty-eight years ago, or because no one in the family particularly trusted him these days.

      Then, with some levity to her skepticism, Lindie said, “You’re going to be the one to set up a hair-and-makeup trial for me and my bridesmaids?”

      “Sure. Why not?”

      “And you know that if we don’t like what Abby does, we won’t hire her, either, and that’s going to make the other part a lot harder.”

      “I’m up for any challenge,” he claimed.

      “The first one will probably be scheduling your own haircut in a busy salon on short notice,” Lindie said. “Let alone getting them to fit in a test run and an entire wedding party in just over a week.”

      “I’ll do whatever it takes,” he assured them.

      Lindie looked to GiGi, who put Dylan under the kind of scrutiny she’d used on them when they were kids trying to bargain themselves out of punishment.

      When Dylan didn’t waver she seemed to give in without much enthusiasm and said, “Well, give it all a try and let’s see how you do.”

      “And make it fast!” Lindie added, before she said she had to run and left Dylan alone with his grandmother.

      Who returned to staring at him.

      “Lunch went all right?” GiGi asked after they heard the front door close behind his sister.

      “I think so. Nati wasn’t really warm and fuzzy toward me, but she said she accepted my apology.”

      “And Cade?”

      “We’re okay. Nati had to be somewhere so she left right after lunch. Once she had, Cade said he was cutting me a little more slack than she was because we’re family and he thought I’d had the wool pulled over my eyes. But that I should have known better...”

      A sentiment that seemed prevalent among his entire family. “I agreed and by the time I paid the check things were more like always between us. He even said he’d work on softening up Nati a little more.” Dylan paused, then said, “What about Jonah?”

      Jonah was Nati’s grandfather, and the high school sweetheart GiGi had reconnected with and married several months ago.

      “He told you that his granddaughter would never have been unkind to Lara,” GiGi said with enough of an edge to her voice to make Dylan aware that she was still slightly miffed at him.

      “I know, I know,” he said. “But—I can only say it for the hundredth time—Lara was convincing, and I...blindly took her side...” Because he’d been in love with her.

      “Jonah will be all right,” GiGi admitted then. “He’s forgiving—or how would he and I be together now?”

      Because one of those long-ago Camden misdeeds had been done to him and his family.

      “I can only say how sorry I am,” Dylan repeated what he’d said more times than he could count.

      “And we all see that you’re trying to make things right again—that’s important,” GiGi said, the caring tone of a grandmother creeping into her voice to let him know that while she might not have appreciated what had happened to their family at the hands of his former fiancée, she still loved him. “It’s just going to take time. We’ve never had that kind of thing go on among our own. We’re used to battling what comes at us from the outside, but from the inside?”

      “I know,” Dylan repeated, willing now to accept the truth he’d denied. And to do whatever it took to get things back to where they were pre-Lara. To get himself back to where he was before he’d become the black sheep. And to make his own amends to his family.

      GiGi patted his cheek gently, comfortingly. “You made a mistake, Dylan, but it’ll all come out in the wash.”

      He nodded, hoping that was true. That he’d only rocked the boat.

      That he hadn’t knocked an irreparable hole in the side of it.

      And that maybe doing one of these atonement-projects on behalf of them all would help.

      * * *

      Great hair. Great-looking guy... Abby Crane thought as she saw the man being led to her station on that Friday afternoon, the first week of October.

      She was in the break room, wolfing down a late lunch between appointments. But she could see into the salon through the latticed partition