Bryony arrived alone for the fitting and immediately apologized for being alone.
“Dad’s working. Kit offered, but I don’t want him to see it yet. Is that old-fashioned?”
“It’s your choice.”
“I keep asking people that and they keep saying it’s my choice. It’s very unhelpful.”
Coralie smiled and took her coat. The girl was carrying the same shoebox as before, now with a corner repaired by a strip of tape. Nothing about her suggested she knew Coralie had kissed her father beside a lake two days earlier.
There was no reason she should know. Coralie reminded herself of this while opening the wardrobe.
The changed dress was still unfinished, but its new outline was unmistakable. Bryony stopped talking when she saw it.
“Oh.”
Coralie had learned not to interpret that sound too quickly.
“Would you like to try it?”
“Yes. Sorry. Yes.”
Behind the screen she helped Bryony into the bodice. The fit was better now, the neckline held where they had planned it. A few places still needed adjustment, and Coralie named them briefly before letting her step out.
Bryony looked in the mirror.
Then she turned sideways.
Then she laughed.
“I’ve got legs.”
“You always had legs.”
“They were a rumor before.”
She took a step, then another, watching the skirt move. Coralie felt the familiar satisfaction of seeing the idea leave the table and become something a person could inhabit. It was a different feeling from being thanked, and better.
Bryony put her hands on her hips.
“Is that allowed?”
“Only if you intend to spend the whole wedding in that pose.”
“I might.”
“Then I’ll fit it accordingly.”
The young woman grinned. She sat, stood, turned and reached as Coralie asked. At one point she stopped following instructions and simply walked toward the window, looking at her reflection in the glass instead of the mirror.
“That,” Coralie said. “Do that again.”
“What?”
“Forget I’m watching.”
Bryony tried, failed, laughed and tried again. The skirt moved cleanly around her knees. Coralie marked one small change and stepped back.
“Better?”
“Much.” Bryony touched the neckline. “I was afraid I’d feel bad when I saw it changed.”
“Do you?”
“A little.”
Coralie waited.
“But not because I don’t like it.” She looked at the bodice in the mirror. “I wish she could see it. She’d have opinions. She’d say I should wear my hair up, and I’d say no just because she’d said it.”
“Are you wearing it up?”
“Probably.”
They both smiled.
Coralie showed her the initials inside the bodice, still in place. Bryony touched the blue thread once and let it go.
“Good. I don’t need anything else added. People keep suggesting little memorial things.”
“What do you want?”
“I want to miss her without arranging it for everyone.”
The words were blunt, then Bryony looked embarrassed by them.
“That sounds horrible.”
“No.”
“Dad might feel differently.”
“Then you can talk to him.”
Bryony sighed. “I know.”
Coralie did not mention the way Stellan had spoken about Elspeth at the market. That conversation belonged to him. She concentrated on the hem, grateful for a reason to lower her eyes.
Halfway through the fitting Bryony’s phone rang. She checked the screen and answered with an expression of affectionate irritation.
“Kit. I’m literally wearing it. No, you can’t have a picture.”
Coralie turned toward the worktable to give her a little privacy, though the room was too small for much.
“No, the other envelope. The one with the venue name on it. Yes. Under the blue folder.”
There was a pause.
“Don’t open that. That’s your birthday card.”
Coralie bit the inside of her cheek.
Bryony ended the call and rolled her eyes. “He can take an engine apart, but paper defeats him.”
“Maybe he likes you telling him where things are.”
“Then he can pay me a salary.”
She said it lightly, but there was genuine irritation beneath it. Coralie recognized that too: the small domestic imbalance which could be funny until it was the tenth thing that day.
“Would you like to sit for a minute?”
“No. Let’s finish while I’m in it.”
They worked through the remaining checks. Bryony asked sensible questions, changed her mind about one detail, then returned to the first choice after seeing both. Coralie did not hurry her. They had time.
When she finally changed out of the dress, she emerged in jeans and a sweatshirt, looking younger and more tired.
“Sorry. I’m being a lot.”
“You’re being fitted for your wedding dress.”
“That sounds like permission to be worse.”
“It isn’t.”
Bryony laughed and sat at the desk. Coralie brought her the schedule card for June ninth. They confirmed the appointment and the work still to be done, keeping the decisions in writing so neither of them had to rely on memory.
The dress went back into the blue bag and into the locked wardrobe. Bryony watched, then looked at a sketch on the table.
“Is that yours?”
“A teaching sample.”
“Dad said you were doing a class.”
Coralie’s hand paused on the key.
“He saw the notice,” Bryony added. “He said you looked nervous about it.”
“I am.”
“You’ll be good. You explain things without making that face.”
“What face?”
Bryony demonstrated an expression of patient suffering. Coralie laughed despite the small pulse of unease beneath her ribs.
“I probably make it when nobody’s looking.”
“Everybody does.”
Bryony put her shoes into the box. “It’s good he’s getting out more. He seems in a better mood.”
Coralie said nothing.
“He likes his routine. Work, garden, arguing with the radio. I used to worry about him being lonely, but I think he’s content on his own.”
The sentence landed with a weight Bryony couldn’t know it had.
Coralie straightened the appointment card. “Has he said that?”
“Not exactly. He doesn’t say much about that sort of thing.” Bryony shrugged. “I ask if he’s all right, and he says yes. I suppose I should believe him.”
Coralie felt caught between two people who had not asked her to stand in the middle. She could not tell Bryony about Thursday. She also couldn’t nod as though she knew nothing.
“You could ask him what he enjoys,” she said, then regretted how close it sounded to advice.
Bryony looked puzzled. “I know what he enjoys.”
“Yes. Of course.”
The young woman picked up her coat. Coralie walked her to the door, angry with herself for becoming awkward in an appointment that had gone well.
“Thank you,” Bryony said. “I really do love it.”
“I’m glad.”
“When I got here, I was worried you’d changed too much. Then I put it on.” She smiled. “I’m glad you waited for me to do that before asking.”
Coralie watched her walk away carrying the shoebox. Only when she had turned the corner did Coralie go back inside.
After Bryony left, Coralie found one of the clips still on the fitting chair. She put it away, then looked at the empty space where the girl had been standing. The dress had gone well. That mattered. It ought to have been possible to hold that satisfaction without immediately turning it over to inspect the conversation underneath.
She opened the photographs from the appointment. In one, Bryony was halfway through a turn, smiling at something outside the frame. Coralie sent that one with the requested detail shots. She did not send it to Stellan. He could ask his daughter if she wanted to share it.
Then she sat down with the teaching plan.
The introduction she had written was nearly a page long. She read it aloud to the empty studio. By the third sentence she sounded like someone trying to establish her qualifications before anybody had doubted them.
She crossed out the first paragraph. The second repeated most of it. She crossed that out too.
Her phone vibrated. Bryony had replied to the photograph: That’s the first picture where I haven’t tried to stand like Mom.
Coralie looked at the message for a while. Then she wrote, You looked comfortable. I’m glad.
There were several more things she could have said. She left them unsent and returned to the class plan, where a woman with too many qualifications was still explaining why anybody should listen to her.
She crossed out another sentence.
She did not call Stellan immediately. She finished the work booked for the afternoon, made two small corrections to the teaching sample and bought groceries on the way home. These were not delaying tactics, she told herself. They were things that needed doing.
At seven he called her.
“Bryony says the dress is wonderful.”
“She looks lovely in it.”
“I’ve been forbidden photographs.”
“Apparently you’re not the only one.”
He laughed. “Kit?”
“Yes.”
There was a pause, comfortable at first. She could hear water running at his end, then stopping.
“Did you have a good day?” he asked.
“Mostly.”
“What’s the other part?”
She leaned against the kitchen counter. “Something Bryony said.”
His silence changed.
“About us?”
“No. She doesn’t know about us.”
“No.”
“She thinks you’re happy on your own.”
He let out a breath. “I probably gave her that impression.”
“Are you?”
“Sometimes. I like my house. I like not having to explain why I’ve got six plants in the sink. That doesn’t mean I don’t want to see you.”
“I know those aren’t opposites.”
“All right.”
She rubbed a thumb over the counter’s worn edge. “I didn’t know what to say.”
“You didn’t need to say anything.”
“I know. But I didn’t like feeling as though I was keeping something from her during a fitting.”
He was quiet for a moment. “We’ve had one date.”
“Yes.”
“I don’t mean it wasn’t—” He stopped. “I had a very good time.”
“So did I.”
“I don’t tell her about every person I have coffee with.”
Coralie looked down at her bare feet. “Was it coffee?”
“No.” His answer was immediate. “No. That was a stupid way to put it.”
She waited.
“I don’t know how to tell her before I know what I’m telling her.”
It was reasonable. She could hear that. It also made her stomach tighten in a way she didn’t want to ignore.
“What worries you?”
He moved away from the phone for a moment. She heard a chair scrape.
“That she’ll feel I should have said something earlier. That she’ll think I’m changing everything while she’s trying to get married. That I’ll make it into a bigger thing by explaining badly.”
“Does waiting make any of those easier?”
“No,” he said, after a pause. “Probably not.”
She was relieved he hadn’t offered a beautiful explanation. She didn’t want one. She wanted him to recognize the difficulty without asking her to dissolve it.
“I’m not asking you to announce anything tonight,” she said.
“I know.”
“I just wanted to tell you what it felt like.”
“Thank you.”
For a moment neither of them spoke. Coralie could hear a car passing outside her window, slow over the uneven road.
Then Stellan said, “I would like another date. That much I can tell you without making a mess of it.”
She smiled despite herself. “Good.”
“Would you like me to come by at the end of the class on Thursday? Only if that doesn’t make you more nervous.”
“Thursday is the twenty-fifth.”
“I know.”
She considered the room, the students, the chance that everything would go wrong in front of him. Then she pictured his face among the people at the end and wanted him there.
“The last few minutes. Not the whole thing.”
“Understood.”
“And if it’s chaos, you have to pretend that’s intentional.”
“I work in gardens. I can do that.”
They talked for another ten minutes about ordinary things. When they hung up, Coralie felt both pleased and unsettled. He had not asked her to keep a secret. He had not told his daughter.
She took the clean handkerchief from the drying rack and folded it. She would return it on Thursday. On the windowsill, the small lake pebble caught the kitchen light.
She touched it with one finger, remembering the warmth of his hand around hers, then put the folded handkerchief beside her bag where she couldn’t forget it.