Mina arrived the next morning with bread, coffee and a newspaper she put beneath the dripping umbrella before she hugged me.
“Tell me whether we’re doing the talking version or the quiet version.”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Good. I can do either badly.”
I held on to her longer than I meant to. She smelled of rain and the soap from the theater washroom, and her coat had a missing button I had been promising to replace since March. It was a relief to know something I could fix, even if I had no intention of fixing it that morning.
My flat occupied the top floor of a narrow house above a shop selling expensive notebooks. There was one bedroom, a kitchen that became a corridor if two people used it, and a room I insisted on calling a studio because workroom made it sound more useful than it was. Half the floor was covered in rolls of fabric. The other half held boxes marked with the names of rooms in Daniel’s house.
Mina took in the boxes without commenting. She put the bread on the table and moved a stack of invitations out of the way.
“There isn’t butter,” I said.
“There will be.”
“I mean in the fridge.”
“I understood you. I didn’t think you were making a philosophical statement.”
She found the little packet of salted butter she had brought and set it down with some force.
I laughed. It came out strangely, almost a cough, but she accepted it without looking pleased with herself.
The wedding dress hung from the studio door in its white garment bag. I had carried it upstairs last night while Nick followed with the heavier end, and for one ludicrous moment we’d got stuck at the turn in the staircase. I had started laughing then too. Nick hadn’t. He had waited while I made a dreadful noise that changed into crying before I could stop it.
He had stayed on the stairs, holding the dress, until I could move again.
Then he’d put it where I asked, made certain I had my keys, and left.
“Did you sleep?” Mina asked.
“Bits.”
“Have you spoken to them?”
I pointed at my phone, facedown beside the kettle.
“Do we want to throw it out of the window?”
“Mrs. Corbett walks her dog at ten. I don’t want to hit the dog.”
“We’ll wait until half past.”
She cut the bread while I filled the kettle. My left hand looked wrong around the handle. The ring was still there, catching the light as if it hadn’t heard the news.
I set the kettle down and pulled at it.
It stuck at my knuckle. I had been fine, more or less, with the dress, the boxes, the ridiculous butter. But suddenly I could not bear the ring staying where it was, and the harder I pulled, the tighter it seemed to get.
“Soap,” Mina said gently.
I turned on the tap. She went on cutting bread.
The ring slid free in the sink. I caught it before it could reach the plughole, rinsed it and stood with it in my wet palm.
“I loved it,” I said.
“I know.”
I had shown her the photograph the night Daniel proposed. We had been working late, and I’d run upstairs from the foyer with my coat still on. Mina had looked up from a row of buttons, seen my face and started laughing before I said anything. I remembered being annoyed that she’d guessed. I wanted to remember only that, the little annoyance, instead of how happy I had been.
She passed me a clean tea towel. “You don’t have to decide what to do with it this minute.”
I dried the ring and put it in a little tin that had once held peppermint sweets. It was a poor place for it, but better than my hand.
We ate toast. For a while I told her the story exactly as it had happened, including things that didn’t matter, like the saucer in the fitting room and the way Daniel had folded his phone into his pocket. Mina listened. Only once did she swear, and she apologized afterward because she’d spoken over me.
When I reached the baby, she put her knife down.
“How far along?”
“Eleven weeks.”
“And they thought the booking—”
“Apparently I’m the obstacle between an innocent child and a decent floral arrangement.”
Mina stared at me, then let out a breath through her nose.
“You can be funny about it,” she said, “but I’m still allowed to think it’s dreadful.”
I looked down at the crumbs on my plate. “I don’t know how to be anything about it yet.”
She reached across the table and touched my wrist. That was all. I was grateful she didn’t ask me to explain myself more accurately.
At eleven her phone rang. She glanced at the screen.
“Kit. He has probably lost either a key or the use of his legs.”
It was a key. She spoke to him in the particular patient voice that meant patience had become a finite resource, then closed her eyes for a moment after hanging up.
“I have to go and let him in before he eats the hedge.”
“You don’t have to stay with me.”
“I know. I wanted to.” She stood. “Tomorrow, are you coming in?”
I looked at the drawings spread across my worktable. The Glass Orchard. Summer production, six weeks of performances, costumes that needed to look as though people had lived in them instead of borrowing them for an evening. Helen Voss had given me the contract in January. I’d argued for it, produced a sample jacket, spent a whole meeting defending a color she called unnecessarily difficult.
For the first time since yesterday, I felt something other than the wedding moving toward me.
“Yes.”
“You can take another day.”
“Will the clothes take another day?”
“Probably not. They’re selfish like that.”
I smiled, but the thought of the theater tightened my stomach. People would know. People always knew, especially in a building where one person could drop a spoon downstairs and someone in the fly tower would offer an opinion about it.
“Please don’t tell everybody.”
“I’ve told Rhys there’s a family problem and you might be out. That’s all.”
“Thank you.”
Mina pulled on her coat. At the door she turned back.
“You don’t have to be impressive tomorrow.”
“That seems unfair to the cast.”
“Most of them won’t notice.”
After she left, I stood at the window and watched her turn toward the bus stop. Westmere was carrying on with its Tuesday. A delivery driver argued with a bollard. Two boys ran down the hill with a football between them. Beyond the rooftops the harbor looked the color of an old spoon.
I turned my phone over.
There were messages from Mum, Daniel and Sophie, each beginning with my name as if that might make me more likely to answer. I read only enough to see nobody was hurt, then put the phone down again.
The hotel needed to know. I could not let my silence become agreement.
It took me twenty minutes to write four sentences. I was not proceeding with the wedding. I did not consent to a transfer of arrangements made in my name. I understood there would be costs to discuss. Please contact me separately about those.
I sent it, then called the florist because she had been kind to me and I couldn’t bear to let her find out through an administrative email. She said she was sorry. I said it was all right, then corrected myself, which made us both quiet for a moment.
When I finished, my tea was cold.
I went into the studio and took the scissors from their hook. The first box bore my own tidy handwriting: MAIN BEDROOM. I cut the tape and unpacked my winter jumpers. They smelled faintly of the cedar blocks Mum had given me years ago. I put them back on the shelf above my wardrobe, then stood on a chair to reach the empty space at the back.
By lunchtime, the flat was beginning to look less like a place I was leaving.
Nick rang the downstairs bell just after two. He had texted first, saying the shoes were still in his car and he would be passing on his way to the theater. I had nearly told him to leave them with Mrs. Corbett, then remembered I would have to explain wedding shoes to Mrs. Corbett.
I went down myself.
Nick stood on the step holding the white box. Without a suit bag and the peculiar atmosphere of the bridal shop, he looked like someone I knew: dark jacket, battered trainers, hair still damp from a shower or the weather. There was a little crease between his eyes that hadn’t been there at parties.
“I considered wearing them,” he said. “But I’m already tall.”
“They’re a six.”
“Then we avoided a terrible injury.”
I took the box. It was heavier than it had any right to be.
“Thank you. For yesterday.”
He nodded. I could see him deciding whether to say more.
“Daniel rang me,” he said.
I looked past him at a woman steering a pushchair around the delivery van. “I expect he did.”
“I told him I won’t be his best man.”
There was no satisfaction in his voice. He looked tired.
“You don’t have to do that for me.”
“I’m not giving a speech about the happy couple.”
I looked at him then. “You’ve probably already written it.”
“Most of it.”
“Was I any good in it?”
His face changed. Not much, but enough that I wished I hadn’t asked.
“You were the reason it had a happy ending.”
I put the shoe box against my hip and looked down at the pavement. A green shoot had come up between two paving stones. Daniel would have pulled it out while we were talking. He was tidy in little ways that had always reassured me.
“Did you suspect anything?”
“No.”
“I keep wondering how I didn’t.”
Nick was quiet for long enough that I looked up again.
“I knew he’d been distracted,” he said. “I thought it was work. He told me it was work.”
I had wondered the same thing about work. Hearing Nick say it made me feel a little less stupid.
“He’s your oldest friend.”
“Yes.”
“You sound sad about it.”
“I am.”
I hadn’t expected that either. Some angry, newly childish part of me wanted everybody who cared about me to discover that they had never really liked Daniel. Nick wasn’t offering me that comfort.
“I don’t know what to do with that,” I said.
“You don’t have to do anything with it.”
We stood on the step. A bus labored up the hill, and the vibration reached us through the stone.
“Mina says you’re coming in tomorrow,” he said when it had passed.
“Did she?”
“Only that you’d confirmed the fitting schedule. Mine’s at ten.”
Of course it was. I had written his name there myself last week, in blue pencil, between a hem check and a meeting about hats. At the time I had thought ten was civilized.
“You can ask Helen to put someone else on your fittings,” he said.
“I’m designing the whole production. I can’t avoid half of it because you happen to be in the clothes.”
“Fair point.”
I shifted the box again. He noticed but didn’t reach for it.
“Are you still doing the play?” I asked.
He looked surprised. “Yes.”
“I meant—” I stopped. I wasn’t sure what I had meant. Whether he would leave because Daniel was angry. Whether I wanted him to. Whether it would be easier if everybody from the shop disappeared until I could remember who I was before I walked into it.
Nick glanced at the box. “I was cast before the wedding existed.”
“I was hired before he proposed.”
“Then perhaps we should both go to work.”
He said it lightly. I was grateful for the perhaps, for the absence of a lesson about moving on.
“Ten o’clock,” I said. “Wear something thin. I need the jacket to sit properly.”
His mouth lifted at one corner.
“Yes, boss.”
After he left, I carried the shoes upstairs and put them beneath the dress. Then I took out the fitting schedule.
Nick Arden, ten o’clock.
I had hoped for one room where nobody knew what had happened. Instead, I would have to build it around someone who did.