They file in one by one to collect their things. The hair stylist, the nail tech, the bridesmaid who was hovering in case I needed a veil adjustment. They move carefully, leaving a fragile statue in the center of the room.
“Don’t smudge your mascara, honey,” the makeup artist says, wagging a brush at me. “We worked hard on that wing.”
“I won’t,” I lie.
When the last of them disappears into the hall and the latch clicks, the silence drops over me like a weighted blanket.
I mean to pace, mean to inhale and exhale, and think rationally, but my body has other plans. The room tilts.
Suddenly, the chandelier seems too bright, its light buzzing in my skull. The walls feel closer than they were a second ago, inching in, pressing down. There’s not enough air. There’s not enough space. My heart starts pounding so hard it shakes my ribs.
Okay. Okay. This is fine. I’m just nervous. Every bride gets nervous.
Except my hands won’t stop trembling. My breath starts coming in short, sharp pulls that aren’t doing anything. The corset of the dress constricts, satin and boning tightening around my ribs like a vice. I tug at the bodice, but it doesn’t help. My lungs can’t seem to remember how to fill all the way.
I stumble back onto the bench, but sitting doesn’t help either. The world narrows. Chandelier, mirror, my too-bright eyes, the door that leads to the aisle. The aisle I’m supposed to walk down.
I can’t. I can’t do it.
“Breathe,” I hear myself rasp, but the word doesn’t fix anything.
My chest hurts. My fingers go prickly, like I’ve stuck them in snow without gloves. I press my palms together hard, trying to ground the sensation, but it just makes them shake more.
The edges of the room blur. My vision tightens into a strange tunnel. Somewhere distant, as if I’m underwater, I think I hear music. Soft piano through the closed door, guests murmuring.
I’m supposed to go out there. I’m supposed to smile. I’m supposed to sayI doin front of all of them.
I can’t breathe.
I reach for the only thing that ever made me feel safe when the world got too big.
My fingers find the locket again, the silver warm from my skin. I clutch it hard, pressing it into my palm until the edges dig in. It’s real. It’s solid. I thumb the tiny hinge, flick it open, forcing my clumsy fingers to move.
Her face looks up at me again, the picture small and slightly faded from years of being opened and closed and opened again. My grandma had laugh lines so deep they looked carved into her skin, and a way of looking at you like you were the only personin the room. No one else has ever looked at me in that way since she died.
“Don’t let anyone talk you out of your own heart, sugar.”
Her voice is so clear in my head that, for a second, I swear I can smell her kitchen. Cinnamon. Coffee. The faint scent of wood smoke from the old stove that never seemed to stop burning in winter.
She would hate this room. She would hate this wedding. She’d take one look at the ice sculpture shaped as a monogrammed wreath and say, “Well, that’s pretty, baby, but where’s the soul?”
A hysterical laugh bubbles up in my throat, then twists into a sob. I clap a hand over my mouth, shoulders shaking.
I miss her. I miss her so much, my chest aches with it. I miss my mom, who’s at home in Buckhorn right now because she couldn’t bear to sit through my father’s show. I miss Charlotte, who texted me a picture of a thrift store dress she found last week and said, “This looks more like ‘wedding Faith’ than anything on Vogue.com.”
They should be here. My mom fussing with my hair, Charlotte cracking jokes about how she’s going to trip on purpose just to see the look on my father’s face. They’re not here because they didn’t want to be complicit in something that felt wrong.
And what does it say that I’m the only one still pretending it’s okay?
“You’re making a mistake,” Charlotte had said, while we sat on Mom’s tiny porch the last time I was home. Summer was thick and hot, and the air smelled of dust and dry grass. “You know that, right?”
I’d flinched. “Evan is a good man.”
“I didn’t say he wasn’t,” she’d replied, picking at the chipped paint on the armrest. “I said he’s not your man.”
But all I could really hear in the back of my head was my father’s voice:“Faith, this is going to be the event of the year. Everyone will be talking about it over the Christmas period.”
I didn’t argue. I never do. I just went along the way I’ve been going along for years. One small compromise at a time until I’m here, in this room, wearing a dress I didn’t pick in a ceremony built to impress people I don’t know.
