Chapter 7
"Fine, fine. She's the bridesmaid."
She said bridesmaid, and her eyes went up and down me the whole time.
She was pricing me.
"You really are lovely." She said it through a wide smile. "No wonder Richard held on to you this long."
The other one leaned on the doorframe with her arms folded and laughed.
"Works out nicely, though. She gets to pick a groomsman out at the wedding. Emily, you thought of everything.
"Richard's friends are all decent catches, aren't they?"
"Decent enough." The first one took her time with it. "Depends whether Ms. Winters has the luck for it."
One corner of her mouth lifted on the last word.
I watched the mirror and read the half sentence she kept behind her teeth.
"Seven years," her lips said, "and no man stays interested that long."
In all my years beside Richard, most of what I overheard came in two flavors, envy and speculation.
Almost nobody had ever said any of it to my face.
Nobody had dared.
That had changed.
The wind had shifted, and the laughter had gotten louder with it.
I looked down, set a crooked lipstick straight on the counter, and kept my voice low.
"I couldn't tell you whether the groomsmen are any good.
"Mr. Stanton has always had good taste, though."
The woman blinked, caught out by the fact that I had answered at all.
I raised my head and smiled at her in the glass.
"He picked them for me, so they can't be far off.
"I don't have opinions of my own. Doing what I'm told is the thing I'm best at."
Emily looked over at me again.
This look had more attention in it than the last one.
She had probably heard it, the softness on the surface and the wrong taste underneath.
I had said it too politely for her to find anything to pull at.
The other two let it drop, traded a glance, and laughed the subject somewhere else.
My phone buzzed in my bag.
It was Redgate Farm again.
I glanced down, and my fingers closed hard around the phone.
Redgate Farm: [Ms. Winters, Clover has gone downhill. The tear from the birth is still bleeding and the vet says he can't stop it. Can you come now?]
I looked up.
"Something's come up. I have to go.
"We can do the fitting another day."
Emily hadn't opened her mouth yet when the woman beside her laughed.
"What's more urgent than a wedding?
"Ms. Winters, this is Richard and Emily's wedding. You walk out and where does that leave her?"
The other woman jumped in right away.
"Right. You can't expect the bride to work around you this late."
Emily frowned, as though she found them too blunt.
She still put a hand on my arm.
Her voice stayed gentle, patient even.
"Stella, I'm not stopping you.
"But the dress has to be finished today or we run out of time.
"Your place at that wedding matters."
She paused and looked at me.
"You wouldn't want anything to go wrong out there, would you?"
She didn't mention Richard again.
But I felt myself tense up anyway.
It wasn't because her words carried any real weight.
It was because I'd heard them so many times before.
They were the same lines I had used on myself a thousand times over the years.
One of them told me not to be difficult.
Another told me to get through the occasion first.
The last one told me never to make anything harder for him.
I had already turned to go.
My foot had already crossed the threshold.
My body stopped where it was.
Seven years of habit had spun a thread through me, and one light pull put me back in place.
The phone was still in my hand while something in my chest went cold by degrees.
Obedience had never been the thing.
My body simply remembered.