# Chapter 7: The Great Groom Hunt Begins
Hello everyone, it’s me again! How are you all doing? I hope you’re ready for another deliciously chaotic slice of Jess’s life, because in this chapter of “Married at first swipe free digital audiobook” love, friendship, and one very disastrous bake sale cake all collide. Let’s see what happens when Jess and Tom dive headfirst into the bizarre world of finding Hannah a husband. Trust me, it’s messier — and funnier — than you think!
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It had been quite a fortnight. Jess had imagined that the moment the press release went out, her inbox would be full of eager grooms and the media would come knocking within about fifteen minutes. But that didn’t happen. Instead, the whole thing started off with an awkward, deafening silence. Save The Date, however, turned out to be like a slow-burning fuse. By the time the application deadline arrived, the whole thing had erupted into a mini online storm.
Suddenly, everyone was talking about the blind-date wedding. Their Instagram post — a cute snapshot of Andy proposing to Pippa — pulled in over five thousand Likes, while their Facebook post had been shared by thousands of people. And although the national press didn’t come calling, some north-west online sites happily picked up the story, and Pippa and Andy’s local paper, the Bristol Post, ran a feature about them. That feature boosted their subscriptions so much that membership numbers jumped by thirty per cent. They still hadn’t hit the magic number the bank required, and quite a few of the new members had taken advantage of a discounted subscription fee, but Jess and the team were quietly pleased with themselves.
“Now we just have to keep hold of these members and build on the figures,” Jess said cheerfully as she, Hannah, and Tom sat in the summerhouse with mugs of coffee and biscuits. “Easy, right?”
Tom grinned. “Oh, and there’s the small matter of sifting through over a hundred applications from men eager to be Hannah’s husband!”
Hannah laughed. “Just a small matter. I think it’s only fair that I have a quick scroll through the applications inbox and weed out any no-hopers.”
But Jess shook her head firmly. “Absolutely not! This is a blind date, remember? You’ve put your trust in my hands. And Tom’s, I guess. I’m going to whittle the list down to ten, and then I’ll ask them some more specific questions to eliminate seven more. Then I’ll meet the three remaining potential grooms for a coffee. Basically, Han, I’m doing all that pre-date getting-to-know-you chat and the actual first date for you. It’s going to be so much fun!”
Hannah raised an eyebrow. “Is it, J?” She couldn’t resist reminding Jess how long she and “Tank here” had been together — nineteen years in May. “That’s a long time. A long time in which you’ve clearly forgotten how tedious it is weeding out the time-wasters, mummy’s boys, and perverts. Wait! You’ve never actually had to do that, have you? Oh my god, welcome to my world! Tom, she’s going to need all your support, believe me!”
Tom shrugged playfully. “Don’t worry, the kids and I are going to be her wing-family. We’ll whisk her away from any weirdos she meets in coffee shops. Although it’s going to be a bit strange seeing my wife go on dates with men right under my nose.”
“Actually, that is weird,” Hannah agreed.
“The things I do for my best mate,” Jess laughed. Then she opened her mouth and out popped a terrifyingly ill-advised joke: “Imagine if I ended up falling for one of the handsome grooms-to-be!”
As soon as she said it, she wished she could shove the words right back inside her mouth. Hannah found it hysterical. Tom did not. His face tightened, betraying the fact that he wasn't completely comfortable with this new world of coffee-date missions and mystery grooms. Things had been okay-ish between them recently — no big arguments, mainly because Jess had bitten her tongue repeatedly as Tom repeatedly failed to help around the house. She was eager to keep it that way.
“Not that that would ever happen, obviously,” she added quickly.
Tom cleared his throat. “Right, well, I look forward to seeing the fruits of all our labours. Let’s hope they’re not all right plums.” He forced a smile and headed back to the house to get some work done.
Hannah guffawed the moment he was out of earshot. “Tank is such a good sport. I hope my new husband is going to play along with my mad schemes like he does with you.”
Jess gave a vague “Mmm.” Already her mind was elsewhere. She decided to spend the afternoon working through the applications from the kitchen table rather than sit two metres away from Hannah, which would have driven them both mad with curiosity. Hannah pleaded for a little peek every half hour, but Jess was relentless.
“Han, looks like I’m retiring to the kitchen this afternoon. But maybe when I go pick up the kids, you should knock off early and go to the gym or something to take your mind off it.”
“Yes, boss!”
By three o’clock, Jess didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. They’d received over a hundred applications, sure, but more than half of them had gone into the “NO” folder within seconds. Two hundred words to explain why you wanted to marry a woman you’d never met. And yet the answers were monumentally misguided. One man wrote that getting married would finally persuade his crazy ex to leave him alone. Another honestly believed that because his sister had just had a baby, he should get married as quickly as possible too. And then there was the man who wrote that he rarely left the house, so he found it difficult to meet women. Jess’s heart softened for a moment, but she knew better. Adding him out of pity wouldn't help anyone, especially not her outgoing, wanderlust-obsessed best friend.
After a long, exhausting cull, Jess was left with forty emails to read properly. So once she had coaxed the kids into bed, loaded the dishwasher, and wiped down every last kitchen surface, she lowered herself onto the sofa next to Tom. He had managed to find some gruesome-looking Netflix drama about, apparently, someone getting stabbed repeatedly. Jess opened her laptop and pulled up the “MAYBE” list.
This time, before even reading their words, she opened the attached photos. She didn’t want to judge on looks alone — that went against Save The Date’s core values — but she also knew she had to find someone Hannah would fancy at first sight, or at least within a few weeks of convincing herself to give him a chance.
Her eyes wandered over to her own husband lolling beside her. Tom wasn't at his best in tatty tracksuit bottoms and a paint-spattered grey T-shirt. But after almost nineteen years, she still loved his blue eyes, kind face, and slightly crooked teeth.
He caught her staring and smiled. “You all right, love? Oh, damn, that reminds me — Lily said the school is having some kind of bake sale tomorrow, and the twins need to bring a cake in.”
Jess frowned. “I haven’t seen a letter. Are you sure she didn’t mean next week?”
Tom winced. “Well, she told me about it when I picked the kids up last Friday, and I totally forgot to tell you. Sorry. Have we got anything in the cupboard they can take? Or if not, can you drop into Sainsbury’s before drop-off tomorrow? I’ve got a meeting about that possible commission first thing, otherwise I’d do it.”
Jess stared at him, her blood pressure climbing quietly while the victim on screen died dramatically in a pool of his own blood. She gritted her teeth. “I’ll just go and sort that out then.”
“Thanks, love.”
She stormed into the kitchen, opened the treat cupboard — and found the emergency Swiss roll hidden at the back. It was meant to be hers. She’d been planning to enjoy it in three glorious slices with a giant cup of coffee, with no children anywhere near. But now the “plastic cake” was destined for a bake sale. She sprinkled it with icing sugar and popped it into a tin, hoping none of the other mums would notice it wasn’t homemade. She normally spent the evening before school sales baking a proper Victoria sponge, one that always looked distressingly homemade despite her best efforts — with cream spilling out the middle and slightly burnt bits around the side. The irony wasn’t lost on her: now she was trying to make a supermarket cake look more homemade.
Furious, she strode back into the living room ready to unload her fury. But Tom was snoring on the sofa, the TV still showing people beating each other senseless.
“Typical,” she fumed. “Bloody typical.”
The fury carried over to the morning. Just as they were about to rush out the door, Lily chirped, “Muuuum, have you made a creamy cake for the bake sale today?”
“No,” Jess said tightly. “Your father failed to tell me about it. But we have got this lovely-looking Swiss roll instead, so don’t worry.”
Sam peered into the tin. “Isn’t that the one that was at the back of the treat cupboard? I wasn’t looking in the cupboard, obviously, because I know that’s naughty. Lily must have told me about it.”
“I did not!” Lily yelled. “You are such a liar, Sam!”
By the time Jess had prevented World War Three, they were running late. She rushed the twins into school, with Lily carefully carrying the cake tin. Outside, their teacher, Mrs Simmons, gave them a warm greeting.
“Good morning, Lily, good morning, Sam.”
Lily beamed. “Good morning, Mrs Simmons! Mrs Simmons, we brought a Swiss roll from the treat cupboard for the bake sale because Dad failed to tell Mum about it, but Mum made it look like she baked it, which is good, isn’t it?”
And with that, Lily skipped into the classroom.
Jess’s cheeks went bright red. She stared at the floor, the sky, her shoes — anywhere but at Mrs Simmons. “I’m sorry, we’ve both just been so busy and—”
But Mrs Simmons just grinned. “Oh, don’t worry at all, Mrs Taylor. At least you remembered — unlike some other parents — and you made the effort to put it in a tin and everything.” Her eyes twinkled.
Jess barely returned her smile before rushing back to the car.
“God, I felt like I’d been reported to the headmistress, thanks to Tom’s stupidity,” she moaned to Hannah when she finally arrived at the office. “I was so embarrassed. What, what’s so funny now?”
Hannah was already laughing. “Oh, it just made me think of us at school when I’d make you skive PE or ask to copy your homework and you’d get all funny about breaking the rules even a tiny bit. You are such a goody-two-shoes!”
“Why get into trouble when you can just do things properly in the first place?” Jess huffed. “That’s what made me so annoyed about the cake sale. If Tom had only told me, then I wouldn’t have had to get so annoyed last night.”
“No,” Hannah said lightly, “you’d have spent the whole evening trying to make the perfect cake instead. Jess, I’m saying this as your best friend, but sometimes you need to chill the fuck out!”
Jess stared at her, unsure what to say, until she spotted Hannah’s lips twitch — and soon they were both giggling. “I know, but I can’t help who I am. As you say, I’ve always been like this, so there’s no helping me now.”
Hannah winked. “One of these days I’m going to bake you some brownies that will definitely make you chill out! Although knowing you, you’d take them to a bake sale and it’d be the kids who ended up horizontal, not you!”
“Mmm, brownies…” Jess groaned. “With all this talk of cake, I could eat a whole tray right now. And on that note, I’m going to spend another afternoon in the kitchen reading through applications, so you’ll need to run things in here later — is that okay?”
“No problem, captain. In the meantime, in the absence of any cake, shall I at least make us a large cup of coffee and see if there are any old digestive biscuits in the bottom of your drawer?”
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By the end of the following week, Jess had managed to whittle the applicants down to ten hopefuls. She sent them extra questions, and one by one, they answered. All ten sounded normal. None of them looked like Jack Nicholson in The Shining, which was a relief — because one memorable applicant, “Dean from Bristol,” had thought it wise to attach a photograph of himself dressed as his favourite horror movie character. Needless to say, Dean was not among the ten.
After dinner on Friday night, with Lily safely at a sleepover and Sam upstairs in bed reading (lured by the promise of pancakes for breakfast), Jess topped up both her and Tom’s wine glasses and planted her laptop firmly in front of him.
“Right,” she announced. “Let’s go through the candidates and their answers, and we’ll each give them a score out of ten and see which three come out on top.”
Tom deadpanned. “Yes, Lord Sugar.”
“Tom, I hope you’re taking this seriously,” she warned. “This is Hannah’s future we’re talking about here, not some poxy gameshow.”
“I am taking it seriously! But you have to admit it’s a strange way to set someone up on a date.”
“On a blind-date wedding,” Jess corrected. “And no. Now that I’ve been working on it for a while, it doesn’t sound as strange as I thought it would. It actually makes a lot of sense for someone’s friends and family to be involved in finding them the perfect match. After all, we just want Han to be happy. I’m thinking about adding an element of ‘what my loved ones say about me’ into Save The Date actually — like that old dating site where your friend had to write your profile for you?”
Tom chuckled. “Do you remember that dinner party at Pat and Susie’s years ago when we’d just left uni, and everyone was trying to be all grown-up, but we all got horribly drunk and persuaded Lisa we should rewrite her profile for her? She got loads of messages from weird men with strange fetishes for months afterwards, even though she deleted everything the next day!”
“God, I’d forgotten about that! Poor Lisa. Especially since she ended up marrying Awful Justin. Urgh. I think I’d rather have a man with a strange fetish than that greasy-haired, obnoxious oik. Anyway, enough chat and more grooms-to-be.” She nudged her husband. “What do you think about Brian from Slough?”
Tom pulled a face. “He’s called Brian.”
“He can’t help his name — that’s his parents’ fault, not his.”
“And he lives in Slough.”
“Right. But what about him as a person? He sounds nice, no?”
“I guess. But he’s a bit run-of-the-mill, isn’t he? Surely Hannah deserves someone cooler?”
“Okay, what about this one?”
Tom leaned in, his face suddenly lighting up. “Yes! It should definitely be him.”
“Are you basing that solely on the fact he’s called Tom?”
“Maybe...”
“I knew we should have done this before opening the wine. If you’re not going to take this seriously—”
“I am, I promise, sorry,” Tom apologised, pulling his best puppy-dog-eyed contrite look. “Tom does sound okay, though. And he lives in north Wales, which isn’t very far. Have you thought how it’s going to work if Hannah’s groom lives in Devon and she’s here in Manchester?”
“I know, location is definitely something to bear in mind,” Jess admitted. “Although Brian in Slough is the furthest away on the shortlist, and I’ve made sure most of the others live within a sixty-minute drive. So we’re saying Tom is a possible, yes?”
“Yes.” Tom nodded, tapping the screen. “And I like this other guy’s application too.”
Jess read the words over his shoulder.
“My sister has slightly strong-armed me into this, but I know deep down she’s right. Two years ago I thought I had it all — I was engaged to the perfect woman and we were happily planning the rest of our lives together, but then everything changed. To be honest, it’s taken me a long time to get to a point where I can settle down with someone again. And maybe that someone could be Hannah. The old me loved travelling, eating weird and wonderful foods, and playing guitar in a rubbish band. And the new me likes these things too, as well as pints in proper pubs, live comedy shows, and listening to other people play guitar in non-rubbish bands. Now I’m up for a challenge and an adventure — and what’s more adventurous than a blind-date wedding!”
“That’s Toby,” Jess said thoughtfully. “I liked him too. But I worried he had too much baggage.”
“Maybe, but at least he’s been honest. And he’s, what, thirty-eight? Who doesn’t have baggage at our age?”
“True. Okay, he’s in. Do we need one more for our shortlist?”
Another glass of wine later, Tom had dismissed all seven other applicants as “too strait-laced,” “too sexist,” or “too vegan.”
“Maybe you only need to meet the two we’ve shortlisted,” he suggested, draining his glass.
“No, I think we should go through the others again tomorrow when we haven’t drunk a bottle of wine between us. We don’t want to miss anyone out.”
The following day, however, Brian and the others seemed no more appealing. Jess sighed and shut her laptop.
“I’d better call Toby and Tom and set up meeting them for coffee,” she said solemnly. “It’s so weird to think that one of them could end up being married to Hannah!”
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And that, dear listeners, is where we leave our heroine — with a shortlist of two, and a blind-date wedding hanging in the balance. But let me pause for a moment to catch my breath!
## Reader's Impressions & Star Rating
This chapter made me feel every emotion under the sun. My heart ached for Jess as she tried to hold everything together — the business, her marriage, the endless school bake sales — while her husband politely failed to actually support her. I laughed at the Swiss roll disaster and cringed with her when Lily proudly announced to her teacher that Mum didn’t bake anything. There’s something so honest and relatable about Jess’s struggle to control everything, while Hannah gently reminds her to “chill the fuck out.” And the tension between Jess and Tom after her careless joke about falling for a groom? Oof. That’s going to linger. I also loved watching Jess and Tom slowly sink into the vino while deciding Hannah’s future — it’s chaotic, it’s endearing, and it feels like real friendship. A rich, warm, funny chapter. It earns a glowing rating.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Rating: 4.7 / 5 Stars
## Next Chapter Prediction
I have a feeling the coffee meetings are going to be anything but straightforward. Jess is heading out to meet two mysterious grooms — Tom from north Wales and Toby with the heartbreaking past — and you just know something is going to go gloriously wrong. Maybe she’ll accidentally fall for one of them after all? Or perhaps Hannah will decide she wants to do her own sneaky investigation on the side, with very messy consequences. And I can’t shake the suspicion that Tom’s insecurity about Jess going on dates is about to bubble over. One thing’s certain: the blind-date wedding is only just getting started, and there are plenty of surprises left to come!
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