The Winters(69)

“Well, now. You do lurk.”

“I couldn’t help it. I was worried about you. Adele said your mood dipped whenever you checked your phone, so I . . . I poked around.”

“You talked to Adele, too? Did you, like, pick up a book about being Super Stepmom or something?”

“I just care.”

“Well, I don’t care. It stopped anyway.”

“So it was Claire?”

“No. It was my dead mother,” she said. “Now close your eyes. I’m almost done.”

While I shut them, I heard the fizz of a glass of champagne being poured.

“Dani.”

“Come on. It’s a special occasion. I can handle a mouthful.”

She drank more than a mouthful, then tipped the glass to my mouth, offering me a careful, fortifying gulp.

“Mm. Thank you.” Our eyes met. “Thank you for everything. Especially today.”

She shrugged.

“I couldn’t have done this without you. I would have had a meltdown over this dress. I wouldn’t have recovered.”

“Crazy how well it fits.”

I peeked at the mantel clock. A wave of nausea washed over me.

“Don’t move,” said Dani, still fidgeting with a lash. “Almost there. And . . . done.”

She held up a mirror, and I blinked a couple of times to get used to the weight on my lids. My face looked like my face, but dramatically alive.

“You are good at this. I mean it. This might be your calling.”

“Tell Daddy that and he’ll have a heart attack. If I don’t go to an Ivy League college, he’ll be even more disappointed in me than he already is.”

I slapped the mirror down on the dressing table. “Listen to me. I’ll tell you this until you believe it. You are loved exactly as you are. By your father, by your whole family. And by me.”

She smiled, then yanked me to my feet. “Let’s get that dress on and get you married. I’m sick of you two living in sin. It’s fucking disgusting.”

Zipped back up into the dress, sash secured, matching lipstick dabbed on my mouth, I waited in the room while Dani checked on everyone downstairs.

I looked at myself in her full-length mirror. Before Asherley I didn’t covet beauty, not this kind, heightened and illusory. But today of all days I wanted to look exactly like this, to be thought of as beautiful, and if not as beautiful as Rebekah, then at least worthy of Max’s attentions, his love, this home, Dani’s esteem, this dress.

She ran back into the room, flush with excitement. “It’s time.”

I fetched my bouquet from the bathroom, where it rested on the cool marble vanity, a simple bundle of white wildflowers, the first to bloom at Asherley. At the top of the stairs I could hear the guests now gathered in the greenhouse. The small band cued up the “Wedding March.”

“See you on the other side,” Dani said, and headed down.

“Wait. Walk with me.”

“What?”

“Be my maid of honor,” I said. “I can’t do this alone.”

She hesitated.

“Please? Nothing would make me happier.”

She climbed back up the stairs and lifted her elbow to me. I slid my arm through hers.

“Let’s do this,” she said.

Now I was overcome.

“Oh God. Don’t cry now, dummy. You’ll fuck up my makeup job.”

She led the way, my legs useless. We inched down the stairs, past the painted eyes of ancestors unrelated to both of us, whose stories we’d inherit and pass down to our own children. As we crossed the foyer, I could hear the train of this stranger’s dress swishing across the marble tiles. The greenhouse chatter stopped as we reached the kitchen. Then the musicians landed on the part of the tune that indicated the march begins. Won’t Max be so happy to see us like this, I thought, former enemies and now possibly friends? Maybe not enemies. Perhaps we’d been rivals, but over what had we been fighting? For Max’s attention? For primacy at Asherley? A kitten? How stupid it all seemed now, the petty spats, my fear of her. She was just an angry teenage girl resisting her father’s new love. It was natural, an age-old story. Yet ours would have a happy ending. I squeezed her arm again and we kept marching through the kitchen and down the pantry hall, lit on either side by a hundred dancing tea candles, the luminous greenhouse waiting for us at the end.

The music got louder. The flowers stuffing the greenhouse came into view, then the backs of the chairs, each festooned with white ribbons, the tables arranged behind the bridal arch. We kept marching. At the threshold Dani gave me one last squeeze and went to break for her seat. I tugged her closer.

“Take me all the way down.”

I wanted her to bring me up to my spot where Max stood, the smile on his face clear from the back of the bright white room. I wanted to run to him, but I also wanted him to really take this in, the two us, a team. At the reception, when he would gush at how beautiful I looked, I couldn’t wait to tell him it was Dani, it was all Dani’s doing. She averted disaster, buoyed my spirits, gave me the courage to put on this accident of a dress.

One by one, faces turned to look at me, at us, their oohs and aahs drowning out the sound of the Times photographer’s clicking as he discreetly orbited us with his camera. But then a strange chill seemed to ripple through the room, starting at the back and undulating over the small crowd to the front, where Louisa slowly, oddly, rose to her feet. I’d felt this before, in the middle of the Caribbean, when a beautiful sky darkens in an instant and it’s time to race the boat back to the marina. Dani felt it, too. Time slowed. Our bodies tensed. We pulled each other in a little closer. My eyes darted around the room, noting how familiar smiles seemed to melt into horror, Jonah’s then Elias’s, their mouths dropping open. I looked at Dani, followed her gaze to Max’s face, where his initial joy had been replaced by something dead-eyed and angry, aimed directly at Dani. What was happening?