Chapter 17
MOLLY
The woman in the mirror is a stranger.
She has my hair—the stylist has done something architectural with it, soft curls pinned into an elegant knot with a few loose pieces framing the face—and my eyes, and the slightly crooked set of my mouth that I’ve never been able to train into anything more symmetrical.
She’s familiar and not me, but I could almost see the connection.
Except she is wearing a dress that costs more than three months of rent in Manhattan combined, and her skin has been touched up by someone who clearly went to school for the purpose of making other people’s skin look like that, and she’s sitting in a bridal suite in a hotel that Pavel selected, in a city that swallowed me whole years ago and has not yet finished deciding what to do with me.
She looks like a bride. She looks like someone who chose this.
I have chosen this, technically. I need to remember that.
“You look beautiful,” Vet says, from the chair in the corner where she has positioned herself with the quiet authority she brings to all spaces she occupies, her dark eyes moving between me and the door and the window in the regular rotation that I have come to recognize as her version of at rest. She’s wearing a deep charcoal dress that manages to be both appropriate for a wedding and entirely practical for a woman who has a gun somewhere on her person, which I have stopped questioning and started finding oddly comforting.
I imagine she’s carrying more than one gun. “I look like someone else.”
“You look like yourself in an exceptional dress and properly done up.” She tilts her head slightly. “The two are not mutually exclusive.”
The stylist, a small, efficient woman named Helena who has spoken approximately forty words in the past two hours and communicated everything else through the precise language of her hands, makes a final adjustment to the knot at the back of my head and steps away to assess her work with the critical detachment of an artist evaluating a canvas. Whatever she finds there satisfies her.
It’s strange. I’ve been thinking about Carrie Ann since the moment Pavel told me that the wedding would be quiet. No guests. No family, no friends, nothing that would draw attention ahead of time.
I understood the logic, which is one of the more inconvenient things about loving a man who is very good at keeping me safe.
The logic was sound, and the reasoning was correct, and I nodded along with it and then went home to my apartment and sat on my couch and thought about Carrie Ann Kohler for a long time in the dark.
We met in the third grade. She sat down next to me at lunch on my first day at a new school—we had moved again, which we did regularly, another apartment in another part of Manhattan, Kansas, due to my mother following the geography of her unhappiness from one address to the next as though the problem lived in the walls rather than in her.
Carrie Ann put half her sandwich on my mostly empty tray without preamble and said that her mom always packed too much and asked if I wanted it. Turkey and Monterey Jack with mustard.
I said yes, and it was one of the best things I had ever eaten. That was the entire foundation of the longest relationship of my life. She saw what I had on my tray—just French fries, because that was all Mom could afford—and shared what she had. That’s Carrie Ann in a nutshell.
She’s five foot three inches of relentless warmth and terrible puns and an evangelical devotion to homemade mac and cheese that I have consumed in quantities that should probably concern a physician.
She hates her long blonde curls that she’s been trying to tame since adolescence, and her big green eyes that go wide and expressive when she’s excited.
Hates them because they tell on her frequently, because Carrie Ann approaches most of life with the enthusiasm of someone who has decided that the alternative is not worth considering.
I left her behind when I came here, which is the plainest way to say something that has never felt plain. I left because New York had been my dream since I was old enough to understand that dreams were directional, that they pointed somewhere specific, and mine had always pointed here.
We promised that when we got married—not if, when, because Carrie Ann approaches hypothetical futures with the same enthusiasm she applies to present ones—we would be each other’s maid of honor.
We pinky swore, which we both understood was binding in the way that adult contracts only wish they were.
She doesn’t know I’m getting married today.
She doesn’t know I’m pregnant, because that’s a liability for now.
She doesn’t know about Pavel, about any of it.
She knows I work for a powerful man in a complicated industry, because that’s the version of the truth that fits in a weekly phone call without requiring a two-hour debrief and a significant amount of prior context.
She knows I’m happy, or happier than I was, or happy in the complicated way that things can be happy when they contain multitudes.
I look at the stranger in the mirror and think about pinky swears and airport goodbyes and the loneliness of a happy occasion that no one who loves you is present for.
“You’re thinking loudly,” Vet says.
“Am I?”
“You have been since Helena finished your hair. Your face does a thing when you are being sad while trying not to be.”
I look at her reflection in the mirror. “What kind of thing?”
“The kind where you are very still, and your eyes go somewhere else.” She tilts her head. “Cold feet?”
“No.”
Vet is quiet for a moment. “Because your family is not here? Friends?”
“My mother hasn’t been well enough to travel in years, which I believe approximately forty percent of the time, and suspect is sixty percent an excuse to avoid a city she finds overwhelming and a daughter whose life she can’t quite support since I left her behind.
” I look at my hands in my lap, at the absence of a ring that will be there in a few hours.
“My father died when I was a teenager.” I stop, aware that I’m cataloging losses on my wedding morning, which is not a productive exercise.
“I just wish my best friend was here. She would make this into something. She makes everything into something.”
“What kind of something?”
I almost smile despite myself. “She would have opinions about the dress. Strong ones. She would have cried already, at least twice. She would have brought food—she always brings food, she considers it a personality trait, and honestly, she’s right—and she would have made this feel like a real wedding instead of a—”
“Instead of a what?”
I look at myself in the mirror, at the stranger in the expensive dress. “Instead of a survival strategy.”
Helena’s eyes flicker with interest, but still she says nothing and does things to my hair I don’t understand with a spray can and a rattail comb.
Vet looks at me for a long moment with those quiet dark eyes. “Is that what you believe it is?”
“Not entirely. And yes.” Kind of.
Did I think that Pavel and I would head down the aisle one day? I have no idea. But when I think about him, I still get butterflies. And bees.
That stupid vibrator incident. It wasn’t until then that I realized Pavel had a silly side, a genuinely, unexpectedly, tears-streaming-down-your-face silly side, hidden beneath all that controlled precision like a loose thread in an expensive suit.
And it’s not just that. He sees me. That’s the thing I keep returning to, the thing that keeps rearranging my resistance into something more yielding. He has been seeing me for years, in the way that means paying attention to the actual person rather than the useful version of them.
Helena packs up and slips out with the quiet efficiency of a woman paid well for both her skill and her discretion, and Vet stands and moves to the window to do her rotation in better light. I’m sitting alone with my reflection and my complicated feelings.
I know that this is just a moment in time. That this wedding is a survival tactic more than something based on love. I can’t marry for love in the future if I’m dead, so one day, I’ll—
The door swings wide, so I turn. And scream.
Vet moves, and suddenly a gun is aimed at the doorway.
Standing in the doorway is Carrie Ann Kohler.
She’s wearing a dusty rose dress, which she clearly bought for this occasion, and has the slightly breathless look of someone who has traveled a significant distance in a short time and is choosing to accept the gun pointed at her head as a temporary complication rather than a dealbreaker.
Her gigantic green eyes move from the gun to my face and back to the gun.
“That’s my best friend!” I’m already out of my chair, one hand up toward Vet, the other reaching toward the door. “Vet, that’s Carrie Ann, please don’t—”
Vet lowers the gun with the smooth efficiency of someone completing a movement rather than abandoning one, and her expression maintains its default composure. In fact, come to think of it, her expression didn’t even shift when she was about to shoot. “My apologies.”
“No, totally, I get it,” Carrie Ann says, in the tone of someone who does not entirely get it but has decided that getting it is the expedient choice.
Her green eyes are still wide. Her curls have settled around her shoulders in the slightly chaotic halo they always form, and she is clutching a small overnight bag.
I cross the room in three steps and pull her into a hug that has six years of distance in it.
She hugs back with the full force of someone who has been waiting to do exactly this, and for a moment, we stand in the middle of the bridal suite holding on, and I feel something unlock in my chest that I hadn’t realized was locked.
“You’re here,” I say into her shoulder.
“Um, yeah,” she says into mine. “Do you think I was going to miss this? Pavel called me. He explained—well, not everything, but enough, and he asked if I would come and be your maid of honor, and he flew me here first class, and there was a car waiting, and—” She pulls back enough to look at my face, and her green eyes go immediately glassy, which is Carrie Ann right on schedule.
“You look absolutely stunning. I’m going to cry.
I’m already crying. Don’t let me ruin my makeup. ”
“You’re not wearing makeup yet,” I point out.
“Then I have time to cry.” She cups my face in both hands and looks at me with those green eyes, searching the way she has always searched, reading me the way only someone who has known you since you were eight years old can read you. “Are you okay? Really? Are you in there under all this?”
There’s the complicated answer and the one I have time for. “I think I might be.” Strange that it might be true.
“Okay. Give me five minutes for makeup, and let’s get you married.”
“I like her,” Vet says approvingly. “She doesn’t shake easily.”
We laugh because that’s the understatement of the year. Carrie Ann sits where I was having an existential crisis a minute ago, and starts on her face.
I explain to Vet, “Carrie Ann has six younger brothers and sisters, and for whatever reason, all of them like pranks.”
“Pranks?” Vet asks.
Carrie Ann nods, trying not to poke her eye with the mascara wand. “Like when your little brother collects two dozen frogs and hides them under your bedspread.”
“Distasteful,” Vet declares.
“Or when her little sister rigged herself into a harness that made it look like she had hung herself.”
Vet’s eyes bulge. “No!”
“Oh yeah,” Carrie Ann says. “She thought that was real funny. She stopped laughing when she spent three days in a psych ward for a prank, though. After that, they slowed down for a while.”
“That’s beyond messed up.”
I nod. “Yeah. So walking in here, only to have a gun pointed at her—”
Carrie Ann’s laugh cuts through. “That’s not even the first time. Remember Stephen?”
“Oh my god, I forgot all about that!”
“Stephen had a gun?” Vet asks.
I nod. “Stephen had one of those water guns that looked like a real gun—he had painted over the red safety tip—and pretended like he was going to shoot me.”
“What did you do?”
I grin at Carrie Ann. “This lunatic clocked him with a two-by-four.”
My best friend giggles. “You’d think they would have learned not to mess with me, but they’re slow learners.” She corrects the edge of her lipstick. “Let’s go get you married.”
The ceremony is small and quiet and takes place in a room that Pavel has filled with ivory peonies. My favorite. I don’t know how he knows that. Maybe he asked Carrie Ann.
I stand across from him in my expensive dress with Carrie Ann beside me. Vet stands at the back of the room, appearing unexpectedly moved for a woman of her professional background.
Pavel wears a dark suit that fits him the way all his suits fit him, as though it were constructed specifically to make him look exactly like what he is.
Big. Handsome. Impossible to ignore. He’s looking at me with those pale blue eyes, and the look is the one I have no clean word for, the one that makes my chest feel too small for everything inside it.
It’s not a managed look, and it’s not the look of a man executing a survival plan.
I know what it is. I have known for longer than I’ve been willing to say.
The officiant speaks, and we answer, and somewhere between the speaking and the answering and the cool weight of a ring sliding onto my finger.
I stop being the stranger in the mirror and start being something else.
Someone who walked through a door she opened herself, complicated circumstances and all, into whatever comes next.
Carrie Ann cries through the entire thing.