She sits. For all of her soon-to-be-husband's millions,this girl decided she wanted to do her own hair and makeup because she didn't want strangers fussing over her on her wedding day, overstimulating her when she's already running on pure adrenaline and champagne bubbles.
I love her for it. I love her for wanting this day to feel like hers, even if it means crying over bobby pins at nine in the morning.
The wedding is in Poppy's backyard, which sounds intimate until you remember that Poppy's backyard is roughly the size of a small country. What started as "something small, just the people we love" turned into something significantly larger, because it turns out a lot of people love Poppy and Ramsey.
The grounds have been transformed overnight, ceremony space flowing into reception, white chairs arranged in neat rows facing an arch dripping with flowers that Erin helped design.
Catering tents. A stage for the live band Ramsey insisted on. A dance floor, fairy lights strung through every tree.
Poppy was happy to hand all of that to someone else. The logistics, the vendors, the endless decisions about napkin folds and table arrangements. What she wanted was this: a spare room turned bridal salon, just the three of us, doing her hair and makeup ourselves because she didn't want strangers touching her today. She wanted us.
I slide the pin into place, securing the twist of hair exactly the way she showed me three times last week during our practice run.
"There," I say, stepping back to survey my work.
Poppy studies herself in the mirror. Her eyes are alreadyred, and her makeup isn't even on yet, and she looks exactly like a woman who is about to marry the love of her life and can't quite believe it's real.
"I look sad," she says. "But I'm so happy."
"You look beautiful." And she does, even with the red eyes and the trembling chin and the slightly manic energy that's been radiating off her since I walked in an hour ago.
"I look like a woman who cried over a bobby pin."
"You look like a woman who's getting married to the love of her life today and is allowed to cry over whatever she wants." I squeeze her shoulders, meeting her eyes in the mirror. "Including bobby pins."
She reaches up and grabs my hands where they rest on her shoulders, holding on tight. She finds my eyes in the mirror and smiles a teary, wobbly smile.
”I’m getting married," she says.
"You're getting married."
"To Ramsey."
"To Ramsey."
"Lily." Her voice cracks on my name. "I'm going to fall apart in front of everyone. I love him so much."
"Good." I squeeze her hands back. "Fall apart. That's the whole point."
In the mirror, I see us. Two women holding on to each other, one about to walk into the rest of her life, one about to walk away from hers in a couple short weeks. The reflection doesn't show that part, the countdown running in the back of my mind, but I feel it anyway. I feel it because my whole body is screaming at me to stay.
It's at times like this that I feel so much younger than all of them. Poppy is getting married. Erin is building a life withmy brother, secure enough in her relationship to take that kind of leap. They've figured it out. The career, the person, the path forward.
I'm only starting. And I'm doing it so far away.
I have years stretching out in front of me, years of studying and working and being somewhere that isn't here, before I'm anywhere close to where they are now.
By then, everything will be different. By then, Poppy will have the babies she's dreaming about. Erin will have published books and built a life so intertwined with Rome's that you won't be able to see where one ends and the other begins.
And Callahan. There I decide to torture myself with a future I don't want to see. Callahan with someone else. Someone impossibly beautiful who doesn't have to leave, who can be here every morning and every night, who gives him the life he deserves.
Children with his green eyes and his quiet steadiness. A family portrait on Will's mantel that I'll see every time I visit.
And I'll visit. Of course I'll visit. I'll come back to Harbor Hill for holidays and birthdays and all the moments that matter, and I'll walk into that house and meet them. I'll smile at them and say the right things and be the girl he used to know, the one he had a thing with that one summer before she left. A footnote. A memory he's fond of, but doesn't think about much anymore.
He'll give me that distant smile, the polite one, the one you give to people who used to matter. And I'll smile back. And I'll die inside, quietly, where no one can see.
I blink and I'm back in the room when Erin comes back with coffee and more champagne. Dresses hang on the backof the door, pressed and perfect. Shoes are lined up in order of when we'll need them. And on the dresser, Erin has assembled what she calls the emergency kit: safety pins, double-sided tape, a sewing needle and thread, two different shades of concealer, breath mints, Advil, a full box of tissues, and a tiny bottle of whiskey that she places beside the tissues without comment.
