“I always have a face. It’s a common feature on humans, I hear.” Lizanne looked at her steadily, and Rose felt that gaze land somewhere she didn’t have a defense for. She pivoted to the attendant instead.
“The hem?”
“An inch, maybe an inch and a half.” The attendant was already on the floor with a pin cushion. “We can have it done by Thursday. It’s no trouble.” She adjusted a pin and glanced up. “You look absolutely extraordinary. Truly—this wedding is going to be a dream. To be marrying a woman like Lizanne Connors—” She pressed a hand to her heart. “You must be just overwhelmed. How do you even keep your head? Don’t you just freak out every day?”
“Every day,” Rose said. She forced a smile, and the attendant beamed back, satisfied.
Outside the front window, two photographers were already staked out on the sidewalk. Rose clocked them and looked away instantly.
The attendant saw her see them and made a call. “Come through to the back, the light is better for the pinning anyway.”
The back room had a single large mirror, a low platform, and a blessed lack of windows. Rose stepped up, and the attendant knelt, working along the hem with the quiet, rhythmic efficiency of someone who genuinely loved the craft.
Lizanne had slipped away into one of the larger rooms Rose hadn’t noticed exactly when she’d left. Then, the changing room door hit the wall.
Lizanne emerged in a ballgown so massive it barely cleared the frame. It was layer upon layer of aggressive tulle—a skirt that preceded her by a good foot in every direction. She had her arms out for balance and wore the expression of someone who had committed to a bit and intended to go down with the ship.
Rose laughed. It was genuine, unguarded, and out of her mouth before she could stop it.
“I’m considering it,” Lizanne said.
“You look insane.”
“I look bridal.”
“You look like a very glamorous lampshade.”
The attendant, still pinned to the floor, let out a muffled snort.
Lizanne crossed the room in a cloud of tulle and stepped up onto the platform. They stood side-by-side in the mirror. It was funny—it was genuinely ridiculous—and Rose was still smiling when the reflection shifted. Lizanne had stopped performing. She was just standing there, looking at the two ofthem in the glass with an expression Rose couldn’t quite decode. The humor drained out of the room. What was left was the thing Rose had been avoiding for ten days.
This was real. A week from now, she’d be standing exactly like this. The cameras would be live, five hundred people would be staring, and she would be marrying this woman. It wasn’t a rehearsal. It wasn’t a metaphor. It—
“Hey.” Lizanne turned to her. “Look at me.”
Rose looked.
“Our wedding is almost on Halloween,” Lizanne said. Her voice was flat, even, totally stripped of the act. “Look at it as an expensive costume and a very long party, and at the end of it, you go home. You’re just wearing a dress in a room, Rose. That’s the whole thing.”
Rose let her breath out, slow and shaky.
“Okay,” she said.
“Okay.” Lizanne turned back to the mirror. “I do think I could pull this off, though.”
Rose laughed again, shorter this time, but the weight had lifted enough to let the air back in.
***
The attendant finished the pinning and Lizanne retreated to wrestle her way out of the tulle. Rose went back to her own stall and reached around for the buttons after the attendant had taken herself off to tend to something elsewhere.
Her arms didn’t bend that way any better now than they had twenty minutes ago.
She managed three from the bottom before her reach gave out. She stood there, arms wrenched behind her back at an angle that was starting to ache, and accepted that she was stuck.
“I need a hand,” she called out.
“I’ll come in,” Lizanne said from the other side of the curtain.
