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“Probably off to the ladies’,” Pamela said airily. “Well, Valerie, shall we?”
“Are we going as well?” Neil asked, sliding his arm around my waist. I wish I could have felt as confident in his touch as I might have before our fight, but I leaned into him, because Valerie would no doubt be watching for any chink in my armor to exploit.
Michael’s phone rang, and he checked the screen. “It’s my mom and dad. They must have forgotten something. I’m going to take this. If you see Emma—”
“I’ll wander off and find her,” Neil offered.
Valerie and Pamela both gave him a warm goodnight and promises to see us all in the morning. When he left, they shot me cold looks and said nothing more before leaving. So, I guessed Valerie had found a moment to fill her fellow mean girl in on what had taken place in the bathroom.
I waited in the small foyer, casting the occasional look to the hostess who walked around checking on various things she had already checked on a dozen times and impatiently waiting for us to leave. It seemed unlikely that Emma had gotten so lost in the narrow hallway that Neil hadn’t found her yet. Antsy under the increasingly hostile glances from the hostess, I went off to find them.
In the hall that led to the bathroom was a small, empty coat room. From inside, I heard Neil’s voice and…Emma? Crying?
I stood with my back against the dark paneled wall and listened to Emma’s sobs, muffled in her father’s jacket.
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” she sniffled. “Daddy, I don’t know what to do.”
My heart broke for her. She had last-minute jitters. That was totally normal, wasn’t it? It seemed to be, in all the movies.
“Emma, you love—” Neil muted “horrible” from his sentence. “—Michael. From the first time you brought him home, I could see that.”
“Is love a good enough reason to marry somebody? You loved Mom. You loved Elizabeth. Look how those ended up,” she reminded herself, in the guise of arguing with him.
There was so much pain in Neil’s voice when he spoke again, I wanted to burst into the room and hug him. I didn’t, of course; this was Emma’s moment with her father. But it was difficult to hear Neil work through this moment with his daughter, as difficult as it was to know that Emma was unhappy on the eve of her wedding.
“You are not me, Emma. No matter how alike we are. I’ve made stupid mistakes in my past. You’re much smarter than I am.”
“You don’t like him,” she protested.
“But you do.” He made a noise of helpless frustration. “My sweet girl, do you really believe you could cancel this wedding right now and walk away from him forever?”
“I don?
?t want to walk away!” She protested through audible tears. “I just don’t want anything to change!”
Neil didn’t answer right away. I imagined the two of them standing, staring miserably at each other, until he said, “I understand that. Too well.”
“You don’t want to get married to Sophie?” she asked, and my heart lurched. I almost turned and ran. I didn’t want to hear his answer, unless it was going to be the one I wanted to hear. And if it weren’t… Well, I wouldn’t know, unless I heard it.
“I want to marry her. More than I wanted to marry Elizabeth, to be perfectly frank. I don’t feel like there’s an expiration date on our relationship. I don’t feel…pressured,” he said, and the knot in my chest, that had cinched up tight a moment before, untangled a little. “But that doesn’t mean I’m sure that everything is going to be all right once we are married. And I’m afraid, Emma. I’m as nervous as you are that something will change, that we won’t be the same people we were before we were married. But I’m not willing to lose her now because I’m afraid that I might lose her later.”
Emma’s breath was a shuddering sob. “Do you want me to marry Michael?”
Oh, Neil. Please, please answer this one correctly, I prayed.
“I do. I want you to marry Michael.” Surprisingly, he didn’t sound pained or resigned at all, but earnest. He even went on, “He’s very smart, he has a successful career ahead of him, but most importantly, he treats you well and he loves you. I can see that every time he looks at you.”
“Daddy…” Emma’s voice was nearly a whisper. “I can’t—”
She was going to tell him. And it was going to destroy him.
“We can’t… I’ve been seeing everyone. Specialists. They all say I can’t have a baby.”
A rustle of fabric told me that he’d swept her up in a hug. If it hadn’t, the sound of his voice muffled by her hair would have. “Oh, my sweet girl. I am so, so sorry.”
“I can’t do this to him!” Emma was sobbing hard now. “I can’t take that away from him. He wants children so badly… I can’t condemn him to…”
Neil shushed her tenderly as she cried, and I knew he was probably giving her the best dad hug in the history of dad hugs. “Does Michael know?”
