The Gown(28)
Outside? Ann had only been in the garden for a minute or two, and she hadn’t brought anything with—
“Here you go,” Ann said. She held three of the peonies. “I’ll just pop them in a tin for you, with an inch or two of water to stop them from drying out. Don’t forget to top them up when you get home.”
It was too much. “But those were the last of your peonies,” Miriam protested as Ann arranged the flowers in their homely container.
“They’re calling for rain tomorrow—they’ll be flattened otherwise. And I’m glad for you to have them.”
“They are beautiful,” Miriam said, her throat still tight with emotion. “I thank you.”
“You’re very welcome. Until tomorrow?”
“Yes. Until then. Bonsoir.”
She stepped out the door, through the little gate, and began to walk down the street. She held the tin of peonies close to her chest and let the scent of them fill her nose. She walked through the gathering dusk, breathing in their magical scent, and with every step her heart grew lighter, gladder, more hopeful. She had made a new friend. She had found a new home.
And tomorrow would be better than today.
Chapter Nine
Heather
July 13, 2016
It had been an awful day at work, and now her friends in editorial were insisting that everyone meet up for drinks on the patio at the new bar down the street. They’d been bugging Heather about it all afternoon, and normally she’d have gone, but today she just needed to escape.
It wasn’t often that a magazine’s editor in chief canned a cover story, and though Richard kept insisting the piece was “stale-dated crap” and “not up to our editorial standards,” Heather wasn’t convinced. The story in question was a profile of the CEO of a controversial tech start-up; they’d hired a respected investigative reporter to write the thing, and at the time Heather had been annoyed that Richard hadn’t assigned it to her. Now she was just relieved.
When word had leaked out that the piece made him look like a controlling, puerile, and misogynistic jerk, the CEO had freaked out. How he’d gained access to the story before publication was a problem—a big one, since Bay Street had always been known for its editorial independence in the face of corporate pressure.
Another problem was Richard’s dissolving spine. He’d pushed for the profile, he’d approached the writer, and he’d been fine with the angle the story had taken. So why the change? Heather could only assume he’d run into some pushback from their publisher. Normally no one there seemed to care what went on at Bay Street, as long as they turned some kind of nominal profit. But this had all her spider senses tingling, and the last thing she felt like enduring after such a gross day was an evening of gossip, anxiety, and overpriced cocktails.
She told her friends she had a headache, and she waved off their pleas to join them, and in less than an hour she was on the couch at home, Seymour purring away at her side, with a bowl of leftover pad thai for dinner and the TV turned to a House Hunters marathon. It was just what she needed, and even after the show’s ridiculously self-centered participants began to grate on her nerves she couldn’t summon up the energy to find a more congenial activity. She was too tired to read, too tired to tackle the mountain of laundry on her closet floor, and too tired to head downstairs and see if Michelle and Sunita felt like going for a walk.
Only then did she remember the stack of mail sitting on the table by her door. There’d been an envelope from her mom, and she’d been about to open it when the cat had distracted her with his panicked pleas for dinner.
She heaved herself off the couch and grabbed the envelope. It held a commemorative guide to the queen’s ninetieth birthday, the sort that was nothing but pictures and captions, and her mom had stuck a Post-it note on the front.
Bought this for you weeks ago but kept forgetting to pop in the mail. Enjoy!
Love from Mom
Her mom clung to the belief that Heather was interested in the royal family. And she was, but only in the most casual kind of way. She liked Princess Kate, as she persisted in calling the woman no matter how often her mom complained that it wasn’t her real title. And of course she liked the queen. Who didn’t like the queen?
But she didn’t worship the royals the way her mom did, with the kind of devotion that involved getting up in the middle of the night for Will and Kate’s wedding in 2011, and doing so while wearing a homemade fascinator and Union Jack slippers. Her mom had wanted her to come for a sleepover so as not to miss even a minute of the festivities, but Heather had wriggled out of the invitation by inventing an early meeting at work. Why get up so early when she could watch it later on DVR and skip all the commercials and boring in-between bits?
She flipped through the guide’s glossy pages, her writer’s eye tripping over the odd typo, and only began to pay attention when she came to an article on the queen’s 1947 wedding. Heather hadn’t realized how young she had been. Only twenty-one, and still a princess. She’d never noticed how handsome Prince Philip had been when he was young, nor could she remember ever having seen their wedding pictures before. The wedding gown didn’t look familiar, at least not in the way she could close her eyes and instantly see Diana’s dress in all its meringue-y glory. But there was something about it that captured her attention, something that made her look twice . . .