With a raging string of curses, the stalker continued driving the route that had been planned. Breanne and her muscular savior would call 911, report the incident. In ten minutes, maybe less, the police would start looking. By then the vehicle would be off Manhattan ’s streets.

The SUV made the corner on First Avenue; turned again to the side street that led to the bridge ramp, headed for the Queens side of the East River. There was a place near the warehouses, deserted and dingy. The stalker would ditch the vehicle there. Then a short hike to the subway and back to Manhattan.

It would take a few days to create a new plan, but one would be made, and then it would be done. When the handsome groom saw his bride at the altar, her white gown would be replaced with a burial shroud. Yes, one way or another, Breanne Summour was going to die before her wedding day.

THE way I see it, a wedding is a new beginning, full of hope and possibility. Death is an ending-black, dark, final. Flowers are involved with both, and tasteful music selections, but for the most part, brides and corpses have nothing in common, unless you’re talking about the bride of Frankenstein, in which case the bride is a corpse.

This particular wedding story involved a bride and several corpses. I was not one of the corpses. I wasn’t the bride, either. The one and only time I’d been a bride took place at Manhattan’s City Hall, where I waited with my groom in a long line of couples to obtain the proper paperwork, after which my future husband and I were ushered into a room with all the charm of a DMV office. A fleshy-faced justice of the peace in a snug-fitting suit then auto-stamped our marriage license in the midst of declaring us wed, which sounded something like-

“I now pronounce you”… ker-chunk… “man and wife.”

I was nineteen at the time.

In calendar years, my bridegroom was barely three years older than I. Sexually speaking, however, Matteo Allegro had traveled light-years beyond. Case in point: our first date.

The life-altering event began with my giving him a chaste tour of the Vatican Museums. It ended in a Roman pensione with me giggling naked and blindfolded on a narrow bed, my future husband hand-feeding me bites of gorgonzola-stuffed figs. Eve had the apple. For me it was a Mediterranean fruit drenched in honey and balsamic vinegar.

Dozens more times, I’d succumbed to Matt’s perilous charms (not to mention those figs), and by summer’s end my fate was sealed. I’d gone to Italy a virgin art student, determined to expose myself to Renaissance genius. I’d returned pregnant with a daughter named Joy.

Matt had been the one to name our daughter, a child he loved dearly (too often from afar), but ultimately Joy’s name had not been a good predictor of the years ahead, and after ten difficult laps with my groom around the sun, I forced myself to admit that the magnetic young man to whom I’d passionately pledged my undying fidelity viewed our vows not as a sacred covenant but as a loose collection of suggested guidelines. (His addiction to cocaine hadn’t helped, either.)

After our divorce, I’d made a new life for myself and our daughter. We moved to a suburb in New Jersey, where I put together an odd collection of part-time jobs: assisting a busy caterer, writing freelance for coffee industry trades, and baking snacks for a nearby day care center (caffeine free, I assure you).

Unfortunately, my new address across the Hudson and a ream of fully signed legal papers did little to stop my infrequent reunions with my ex-husband. Given his perpetual itches and my own pathetic weakness, the man’s magic hands, hard body, and low intentions occasionally found their way back into my lonely, single-mom bed.

Now, with our daughter grown and working abroad, I was back to living and working in Greenwich Village. My marital partnership with Matt remained dissolved, yet our alliance continued in other ways: like the parenting of Joy, for one (the fact that she’d reached legal adulthood was beside the point), and the running of the Village Blend coffee business, for another.

According to Matt’s elderly mother, who was bequeathing the Blend’s future to both of us, I was the best manager she’d ever employed and the best barista she’d ever met. For his part, Matt was more than simply the owner’s offspring; he was an extremely savvy coffee buyer and broker without whom the legendary Blend would be just another java joint.

On good days, my ex and I actually acknowledged what we meant to each other. Even on bad ones, we managed to remain begrudging friends. So, when he asked me, I agreed to help out with aspects of his second wedding, a union with the annoyingly swanlike Breanne Summour, disdainer-in-chief of Trend magazine.

For months now, Breanne had been planning the nuptials and reception. Photographers were hired (still and video), flower and cake designs selected (elaborate and expensive), dress fitted (a House of Fen original), and venue reserved (New York ’s Metropolitan Museum of Art). In sum, the event was shaping up to be a tad more lavish than the unceremonious City Hall ker-chunking of the man’s first marriage to me.

This was the week that brought us down to the wire. Breanne was moving into panic mode, and her groom-to-be had just moved back into the apartment above our coffeehouse.

“So you’re all settled in upstairs?” I asked Matt as he took a load off at my espresso bar.

“Yeah.” He nodded. “In my old guest room.”

“I can’t believe Breanne is happy with your moving back into the duplex. I mean, she does know I still live here, right?”

“It’s not for long. Just five days. Frankly, she’s happy I’m out of her hair.”

I studied my ex-husband’s wide, unblinking brown eyes. “She doesn’t know you’re staying with me, does she?”

“No.”

Matt, Matt, Matt… “You can stay with your mother, you know. She’d be thrilled to have you.”

He glanced away. “I told you already. Joy’s coming in this week. I haven’t seen her in months, and I’d really like to stay under the same roof as my daughter.”

“One last week of us as a big, happy family, right?”

“Right.”

“And what Breanne doesn’t know won’t hurt her?”

Matt shrugged.

I went back to finishing a double-tall mochaccino order: two steaming shots of espresso stirred into a base of my homemade chocolate syrup, a pour of steamed milk, plenty of frothy foam, and a whipped cream cloud as high as Denali. I dusted the ski slope with bittersweet shavings, set the drink on the counter, smiled at the young woman waiting, and turned back to my ex.

“You wouldn’t be avoiding your mother because she’s been chewing your ear off to cancel the wedding, would you?”

Matt massaged his eyes. “Let’s not go there.”

“Well, I wouldn’t blame you. She’s been chewing my ear off about it, too. For months.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s okay…”

I moved back to the espresso machine, unlocked the portafilter handle, dumped the packed cake of grounds into the under-counter garbage, then moved to rinse the filter in the small sink. The mochaccino order appeared to be my last of the evening. Gardner Evans was due to relieve me any minute, and most of the twenty marble-topped café tables were empty, which was typical for a Monday evening in April. The tourists wouldn’t start flowing back into the historic district for at least another month.

“Anyway,” I told Matt, “all of us have enough to do this week to keep us out of trouble. You’ve got your pals flying here from every country of the coffee belt, don’t you?”

“Practically. They’ll be arriving all week, but I’ll see most of them as a group on Thursday.”

“At your mother’s luncheon?”

“Yeah.”

“And you’re going to have a bachelor party with them, too, right?”