She pushed the thought down. Deep, where it couldn't reach her. Not today.
"I'm ready," she said.
Kate opened the door.
Her father was waiting in the hallway, eyes already red, hands clasped in front of him like he was about to give a speech or catch a football. The sight of him — this man in his rented suit with his too-short tie and his face crumpling the moment he saw her — broke through every layer of composure she'd built.
"Dad. Don't you dare."
"I'm not crying. It's allergies." He sniffed hard. Offered his arm. "You look like your mother the day I married her. Scared the hell out of me then, too."
She took his arm. The fabric of his jacket was stiff and unfamiliar under her hand. It wasn’t the cashmere and Italian wool of Dominic's world, but solid. Her father's arm, taking her somewhere.
They walked toward the elevator. Behind them, Kate carried the train of her dress. Below them, three hundred guests were waiting in a ballroom full of flowers, candles and place cards written in calligraphy by a woman who charged by the letter.
Charlotte's phone buzzed one more time. She glanced down.
Dominic:
She stared at it. Then she put her phone in Kate's hand and stepped into the elevator. She told herself that a thumbs-up emoji was just how some people saidI love you, that the tightness in her throat was just the dress, that the woman in the mirror was her, and that she was ready, and that she was happy.
She was happy.
She was.
CHAPTER 2
DOMINIC
Dominic's tie was crooked.
He could see it in the mirror — a millimeter off-center, the knot listing slightly to the left. It shouldn't have mattered and did. He unknotted it and started again.
"You've tied that thing four times," Maxwell said from the leather armchair in the corner, legs stretched out, a glass of scotch resting on his knee at ten in the morning. "It looked fine the first time."
"It wasn't straight."
"It's a tie, Dom. Not a merger."
Dominic didn't answer. He pulled the silk through, adjusted, tightened. Checked the mirror. Better. He smoothed his lapels, shot his cuffs, examined himself with the same critical focus he brought to quarterly reports. The suit was custom: charcoal, peak lapel, cut close through the shoulders. His dark brown hair was pushed back, jaw clean-shaven, shoes polished to a mirror shine. He looked exactly like what he was supposed to look like. He looked like a man getting married.
He didn’t look like a man in love.
Maxwell watched him over the rim of his glass. They'd been friends since Exeter, twenty years of history that gave Maxwella fluency in Dominic's silences that no one else possessed. He could read the difference between Dominic's working silence and his avoidance silence, and right now his eyebrows said he was reading the second one loud and clear.
"You good?" Maxwell asked.
"I'm fine."
"Because you look like a man about to negotiate a hostile takeover."
"I look fine."
"You look like you're going to a funeral, is what you look like."
Dominic turned from the mirror. "Are you going to be helpful today, or is this it?"
Maxwell raised his glass. "This is it. This is all I've got." He took a sip. "Seriously, though. You good?"
