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CHAPTER1
Emma
The needle pricks my finger and a red dot of blood immediately appears. Shit. There’s no pain, just panic as I stick the punctured digit into my mouth to stop the bleeding. The last thing I need is blood spots on this dress. It’s white, it’s couture and it’s hitting the runway in five minutes.
“Four minutes, everyone!” a voice calls out.
Make that four minutes.
“Models, take your places, please,” Willow, the show coordinator, announces into her headset. She’s on the far side of the room, waving her arms toward the stage. She’s like the grounds crew at the airport, except instead of waving orange batons, she’s flagging the women into position with a clipboard in one hand and a lint roller in the other.
The movement around me might seem chaotic to others, but I’m used to it. For many years I watched my mother take the runway at some of New York Fashion Week’s top shows, her lithe figure donning some of fashion’s iconic looks at the time, and that’s where I fell in love with fashion.
I’ve been backstage at every couture fashion show you can imagine, brushing shoulders with names like Lagerfeld and Versace. Okay, maybe it was more like my shoulders to their waists, because I was six, but let’s just say this environment is second nature.
The lights, the energy, the urgent countdown to the start of the show. The designer sewing a model into her dress and stabbing herself in the finger. That part is new but exhilarating all the same.
I tie off the thread, knot it and cut the excess.
“All right, Anna, you’re in.” Taking me for my word, she doesn’t bother to look back as she rushes off to get in line with the other models. When I stand from where I was crouched on the floor to finish the detail on Anna’s dress, I notice the dark black spots on my pink dress. Shit. I had been so focused on sewing the dress, so intent on getting it ready that I hadn’t stopped to think about kneeling on the floor, the delicate hemline of my dress tucked under my knees. The hemline that is now smudged with dirt.
“Two minutes!” Willow shouts.
I hustle to a nearby hair and makeup station to look for a towel or wipe or something I can attempt to clean myself off with.
“What are you doing?” Jess, my personal assistant and friend, appears beside me. Her eyes go wide when I pull away the wipe that was not only unsuccessful in removing the dirt spots, but made them wet and splotchy.
“No one will notice, right?” I glance down and then back up to Jess’s face. While I’m not modeling in the show, I am the designer and will be taking a walk down the runway at the end.
We’re at the Blushing Bride Convention in Las Vegas for my first official runway show. The top five up-and-coming bridal gown designers were invited and I was asked to headline the show. According to the brochure they put out, I’m the hot new bridal gown designer that’s got a flare for ‘sassy, flirty gowns that are guaranteed to make you own your day.’
I would be panicking, but Jess is a fixer. Maybe because she’s had to be. Jess is my assistant, but also my publicist, my marketing assistant and head of branding. She wears a lot of hats at Emma Belle Bridal. She’s used to these crunch time disasters and always has a solution to a problem.
“Hold on.” Jess strikes her finger into the air. “We’ve got an extra.”
“Dress?” I ask, quickly following her, and wondering why we would have a dress without a model.
By the time we get to the rack at the back of the convention space, I’m breathless. Jesus, this place is huge. Jess unzips the garment bag and immediately my jaw drops.
“No way.” I shake my head in disbelief. “How did this get here?”
“It got mixed in with the other bags in New York. It’s all we’ve got in your size.” Jess slips off the garment bag, exposing the white slip-dress style gown that my mom wore when she and my dad got married. It’s Dior haute couture circa 1991, and I’m obsessed with it. When my mom gave it to me, I’d envisioned making a few small adjustments to update it a bit and wear it at my own wedding.
Mywedding.
I think about the secret Pinterest boards filled with inspiration. The binders of magazine clippings I’ve saved. The vision board I’ve kept on the top shelf of my closet. The years spent curating a dream for an event that up until two months ago I thought would be happening soon. A proposal was inevitable. I’d argue that’s what most twenty-nine-year-old women living with their boyfriend of two years would think. We’d discussed it many times. I’d even had my ring finger sized and conveniently put on file at the top three jewelers in New York.
I was wrong.
Two months ago, my boyfriend, Alec, took me out to dinner to celebrate our anniversary. The sunset was breathtaking, the martinis were dry and although I was freezing in the white cocktail dress I’d put on, I was determined to be dressed for the occasion regardless of the thirty-five-degree temperature that evening. I thought he was going to propose over oysters and champagne.
Not only was he not proposing, he was breaking up with me.
I was completely caught off guard. It was an Elle Woods,Legally Blonde,moment. Maybe even more so. I’d just finished picking out a new dining room table for our apartment. One that would be host to our future dinner parties, and eventually family meals with our children. It was a beautiful reclaimed oak table. The saleswoman said it was great for families because it would resist dents and stand up to anything. What she failed to mention is that it was custom and therefore unreturnable. It now serves as a worktable at my rented boutique space in Brooklyn.
Now, I’m living with my parents, which isn’t exactly a hardship. They’re rarely in the city and it’s a penthouse on Park Avenue, but still far from the life I thought I would be living at thirty.
That’s right, today is my birthday. As of seven nineteen this morning, the time I was born and the exact moment when my parents called me from Barbados, I am thirty now.
