It’s not too unlike how I feel.
I’m sitting on the closed toilet lid with a towel around me and another around my hair. My face is completely bare for the first time in twenty-four hours. No makeup. No veil. No constructed version of myself assembled for anyone else’s approval.
Just me.
I’m not sure I recognize her.
Three knocks on the door pull me out of my reverie.
I open the bathroom door a crack to see Griffin standing there, holding his phone out to me.
“It’s Madison,” he says.
My stomach drops and tightens in the same motion. The guilt that’s been sitting in my chest since the church steps sharpens.
Griffin offers me a smile that makes me steel my spine. I try to smile back. I think my mouth moves.
“Thanks,” I whisper as I take the phone.
Madison doesn’t cry. That’s how I know she was scared. When she’s frightened, she goes very quiet and very still. Her voice comes out careful and even, and she asks questions in the order she’s numbered them in her head.
“Are you safe?” she asks.
“Yes.”
“Are you okay?”
“Working on it.”
“And you’re with Griffin?”
“Yes.”
“Okay.” A long exhale. “Okay.”
Then she’s just there, on the other end of the line, not filling the silence, just being in it with me the way she has done my entire life. My sister, who learned to be steady because someone had to be, decided early that it would be her.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “About today. About everything. I’m sorry I didn’t—”
“Stop.” Her voice is firm but not unkind. “You don’t apologize to me. Not for this.”
“Mom—”
“Is fine. She’s worried, but she’s fine. Rowan is… Well, Rowan is Rowan.”
“She called it,” I say. “With the shitting myself thing.”
“She called it at the rehearsal dinner, actually. She had twenty dollars on it.”
“She bet money on my wedding?”
“On you not going through with it,” she corrects. “Which she maintains is different.”
I laugh before I press my lips together and look at the floor.
“Piper,” she implores. “You can tell me. Whatever it is. All of it. Whenever you’re ready.”
And I want to. I want to sit on this bathroom floor and tell my sister everything, all of it, pour out the last three years inthe order it happened and let her help me make sense of it. But there’s something in me that isn’t ready yet, some door that needs to stay shut for just a little longer, until I understand the shape of what’s behind it.
