Don't Call Me Little Girl

Joan Doubleday, a woman whose life has ossified into a perpetual engagement without nuptial consummation, drifts through twelve calendar cycles tethered to the affable yet inertia-oozing Monty Wade. Into this suspended animation barges Jerry—Joan’s teenage niece, equal parts firefly and hurricane—who decides the fiancé is a collectible she must own. While Joan’s reticence curdles into spinsterly wallpaper, Peter Flagg, the quiet cartographer of her unspoken contours, worships from the periphery. On a wedding morning drenched in white-fluttered anticipation, Jerry detonates decorum: the grooms have swapped, Peter will now stand at the altar, and Monty is relegated to footnote. Chaos ricochets through drawing rooms and rose-strewn vestibules; quarrels bloom like bruises. Yet the niece, half saboteur half Cupid, engineers a final coup of the heart, persuading Joan that destiny wears Peter’s face, not Monty’s tepid mask.