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I’m a fake, she thought. A total fake.
“Honestly, the dress is fine. It looks great. Better than anything else I own, I promise you that.” It was a struggle to stand still. “There’s no time to adjust it. The wedding is in four days. Unless you feel like postponing?”
Rosie’s eyes widened. “Are you joking?”
“Ha! Of course I’m joking.” She wasn’t joking. “I’m surprised you managed to pull all this together in such a short time, that’s all. That’s put a lot of pressure on Catherine.”
“It was Catherine’s idea,” Rosie said and Katie stopped wriggling.
Was that why her sister was doing this? Why hadn’t that thought occurred to her before? Maybe she’d been pressured by Catherine. Well-meaning pressure, but still—
“I love a winter wedding,” Catherine said, “and I have never seen two people more in love than Rosie and Dan, so it seemed right.”
It didn’t seem right to Katie. Why was she the only one questioning the speed of this?
She wanted to hold up her hand and yell stop, stop!
Was this really what Rosie wanted?
Admittedly Katie hadn’t so far discovered anything about Dan that provided her with an excuse to step in and halt proceedings, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t something there.
Maybe there were incidents in his childhood that might offer up clues as to his character.
“Parents always talk about what makes them proud of their children,” she said. “They rarely talk about the things that embarrassed them. Did my mother mention the time she was called into school because Rosie had freed the school rabbit from its life of incarceration?”
Catherine laughed. “That is so like Rosie.”
“It wasn’t only me.” Rosie gathered up her hair and studied herself in the mirror. “There was that time Mum had to go to school because you’d been accused of cheating in an exam. You denied it, and there was this huge bust-up. You yelled at the teacher for calling you a liar. They said you needed to learn respect, as well as not to cheat.”
“I remember that. I’ve never been good at dealing with injustice.”
“Mum was called in,” Rosie told Catherine. “They wanted Dad, too, but he was on a dig in Egypt.”
Katie shrugged. “Dad never dealt with that kind of thing anyway. He left it to our mother.”
“Yes, and she asked to see the paper, and then she said did it not occur to you that my daughter might have known the answers? The teacher told her it wasn’t possible to get a perfect mark, so Mum asked her to give you another exam and you got a perfect mark in that, too.” Rosie beamed at her. “She always knew you were super smart, and she made sure everyone else knew it, too. You’d told her you wanted to be a doctor, and she wanted to do everything she could to support that and make sure you reached your full potential.”
And now Katie was considering throwing it all away. All the work. All the training. The thing she’d spent a third of her life doing.
She was going to be a disappointment to her whole family, especially her mother.
She really ought to talk to them, but she had no idea where to start. Hi, Mum, you know how proud you feel when you tell people your daughter is a doctor? Well, you’re going to have to start telling them your daughter gave up being a doctor. Sorry.
No, that wasn’t going to work. And if this wedding was going ahead, she didn’t want to be the one to kill the atmosphere by talking about her own issues.
“How about Dan?” Katie turned slowly as the seamstress checked the hem. Her nerves were so frazzled she half expected them to be poking out through the dress. “Did he ever embarrass you?”
“No, but he gave me a few white hairs. I guess that’s what little boys do to their mamas.” Catherine stood back and narrowed her eyes. “I wonder—maybe a flower in your hair?”
“He was naughty?”
“More adventurous than naughty. As a toddler there wasn’t a surface too high for him to climb onto, and as a teenager there wasn’t a slope too steep for him to ski. And he was stubborn. When there was something he wanted, nothing was going to stand in his way. That boy could wear down rock.”
Was that it? Had Dan’s determination to get what he wanted put pressure on Rosie? Rosie hated confrontation. She might find it hard to speak up in that situation.
Rosie was focused on the dress Katie was wearing. “Is the color okay? Is it what you imagined? I’ve been scared you might not like it.”
“I love it.” The dress was a pale, silvery gray that shimmered in the light. It was understated and elegant, and something that Katie would have chosen herself if she’d ever had the need for such a thing. It wasn’t the dress that worried her. What worried her was the fact that the wedding was now only four days away and she still wasn’t convinced Rosie wasn’t making a huge mistake.
