10. Nichole
— ? —
Nichole
He doesn’t ask. He informs.
Two days after his mother sat at our table and called me a line item, Callum appears in the doorway of the sitting room where I’m reading to Olivia and says, “Be in the car at ten.”
“Why?”
“To fix a problem before it turns into one.”
The problem, it turns out, is me.
The car slides through traffic and past neighborhoods I know and neighborhoods I don’t, and when we pull up outside Providence Place - three floors of glass and marble with ordinary Saturday crowds churning past the fountains - I understand.
“No.”
Callum’s hand is already on the door. “You haven’t heard the offer.”
“I don’t need the offer.” I stay where I am, arms crossed. “I have clothes.”
“You have one black dress you’ve worn to a funeral and a job interview.” He says it without cruelty, just fact. “There’s a charity lunch this week. Half of Newport. Every camera in that room goes looking for the girl I married off a bus, and I’m not handing them the photograph.”
The words land somewhere soft, somewhere I’ve been trying to protect.
The girl he married off a bus. Is that what this looks like?
Is that what everyone sees when they look at me - a project, a charity case, a woman so obviously out of place that she needs to be dressed up and presented properly before she can be shown in public?
“So dress the doll.” My voice comes out harder than I intended. “Make her look like she belongs on the shelf.”
“That’s not what this is.”
“You already paid for my brother. Now you want to pay for the wrapping.”
The car has stopped, but neither of us moves to get out. The crowds pass by outside the tinted windows, ordinary people having ordinary days, completely unaware of the conversation happening in this expensive cocoon.
Callum is quiet for a long moment. Then he does something I don’t expect - he turns to face me fully, his expression shifting into something I haven’t seen before. Not the mask he wears for his mother. Not the careful neutrality he wears for the staff. Something more like honesty.
“Those people have spent their whole lives learning how to make someone feel small in a room,” he says. “This week you walk into a room full of them wearing nothing but your pride, and pride tears the second they get a hand on it.”
“I can handle-”
“I know you can handle it. That’s not the point.
” His voice drops, pitched under the noise of the world outside.
“Let me put you in something that doesn’t tear.
Call it armor if the other word chokes you.
Just don’t go in there bare because you’re too proud to let me do the one useful thing I know how to do. ”
I don’t have an answer.
I’ve been fighting people my whole life - landlords, bosses, the whole machinery of a world that isn’t designed for people like me. I’ve been fighting so long that I forgot there’s another option. I forgot that sometimes someone offers you a shield instead of a sword.
“Armor,” I say finally.
“Armor.” He nods. “Not ownership.”
“There’s a difference?”
“You tell me.”
I look at him - this man I married for money, this stranger who sleeps ten feet away every night - and I try to find the angle. The catch. The part where this turns into something I’ll regret.
I can’t find it.
“Fine,” I say. “But I pick.”
Something shifts in his face. Almost a smile. “I wouldn’t dare suggest otherwise.”
Inside, the mall is everything I expected - soaring ceilings, gleaming floors, the particular hush of a space designed to make you feel like you’re supposed to buy things.
We move through the weekend crowds, and I’m aware of how people look at us.
At him, mostly - the cut of his jacket, the set of his shoulders, the way he moves through space like he expects it to rearrange itself around him.
The store he takes me to doesn’t have prices on anything. I’ve learned what that means. It means the number doesn’t matter, which means the number is so large it would frighten normal people.
A saleswoman appears before we’ve taken three steps inside. Her eyes move over me - my department-store blouse, my shoes that still have that water stain - and then to Callum’s watch, and the whole temperature of the room shifts.
“Mr. Lippitt.” Her smile becomes real money. “We weren’t expecting you.”
“This is my wife.” He says it easily, naturally, like it’s a word he’s been using for years instead of days. “She needs a wardrobe for the season.”
“Of course.” The saleswoman’s attention swivels to me, reassessing. I’m no longer a charity case. I’m an account. “If you’ll follow me, Mrs. Lippitt, we have several pieces I think you’ll find-”
“She’ll browse,” Callum says. “She has opinions.”
Something sparks in the saleswoman’s eyes. Interest, maybe. Or respect for a man who knows better than to dictate to his wife.
I’m not his wife. Not really.
But I reach for the first rack anyway, because we’re here now, and armor is armor.
The dresses blur together after a while.
Soft fabrics that cost more than my rent.
Colors that have names like “champagne” and “dove” instead of “kind of beige.” The saleswoman brings piece after piece, and I try them on, and nothing feels right.
Everything feels like a costume. Like I’m playing a part in someone else’s play.
And then I find it.
It’s shoved to the end of a rack, half-hidden behind a row of pastels that someone probably thought were more “suitable.” White.
Not ivory, not cream, not the safe society non-colors - but white.
Pure, uncompromising white. The kind of white that hides nothing. The kind you have to be brave to wear.
My hand closes on it before I can think.
“That’s a bold choice,” the saleswoman says, appearing at my shoulder. “Most women prefer something more-”
“I’ll try this one.”
I take it into the fitting room and close the door on all of them.
***
Callum
She has been behind that door long enough that I have started inventing reasons to leave.
The saleswoman is saying something about tailoring, about hemlines, about the particular challenges of working with white fabric.
I’m not hearing a word of it. I’m watching that fitting room door like it’s going to reveal something I’m not ready for, and I don’t know why I’m nervous, and the not-knowing is making it worse.
Then the door opens.
Every thought I was holding goes out of my head at once.
She chose white.
Of every color in that store, of every safe, suitable, society-approved option that was laid out for her, she chose the one you have to be brave to wear.
She’s standing in front of the mirror with her chin up, and the dress moves around her like water, and I cannot make myself look away from the line of her throat.
Here is a thought I have no business having: this is the wedding I never gave her.
Twelve minutes in a conference room. A pen that skipped. A signature with a scar. That was all she got - no aisle, no witnesses who cared, no moment where someone looked at her and thought there she is.
And now here she is. In white. With no one to see it but me.
It is the most married I have felt since the day I put a ring on a woman who hated it.
Her collarbone. The way the fabric holds at her hip and then lets go. A strand of hair caught against her jaw. I notice all of it against my will, and I hate - genuinely hate - that a woman I hired is doing this to my pulse on an ordinary Saturday afternoon.
“It’s crooked,” I hear myself say, because it’s the only sentence that lets me move toward her.
She meets my eyes in the mirror. “What?”
“The clasp. At the back.” I’m already crossing the floor, already closing the distance I shouldn’t close. “Hold still.”
My hands find the clasp at her neck. Her skin is warm under my knuckles. She’s holding very still, not breathing, and neither am I. In the mirror, I watch her watch me. I watch my own jaw work like I’m holding something back with my teeth.
I want to drag my thumb down the line of her spine. I want to press my mouth to the curve where her neck meets her shoulder. I want to turn her around and tell her she looks like a bride, my bride, and that I’m starting to forget this isn’t real.
I don’t do any of that. I fix the clasp, which was never crooked, and I step back, and I try to remember how to be a man who honors his contracts.
“Callum.” Her voice is low. Careful.
“Hold still.”
But holding still is exactly what I don’t want to do. I have not wanted anything in six years, and now I want, and it is standing in white eleven inches away pretending its heart isn’t going as hard as mine.
I can see her pulse in her throat.
I can see-
“Callum Lippitt. In a mall.”
The voice cuts in like a knife, bright and terrible. I step back - too fast, not fast enough - and turn to find a woman in my mother’s exact shade of pearls standing between the racks.
Posy Wetherell. My mother’s friend and the society columnist behind The Crow’s Nest, the byline that has carried years and years of this town’s secrets across Newport.
She takes it all in with one sweep: the white dress, my hands at Nichole’s throat, whatever is on both our faces that we were half a second too slow to put away.
“And this must be the wife.” Her smile has a hook set in the middle of it. “Adelaide has told us absolutely nothing about you. She’ll be so interested to hear I ran into you two.”
I should say something. I should manage this, the way I’ve been managing my mother’s network my entire life. But before I can speak, Nichole steps forward - out of my hands, out of the moment we were having - and offers hers to Posy like she owns the floor.
“Nichole,” she says. “Tell Adelaide the white was my choice, not his. She’ll want to know I have opinions.”
I have watched grown men fold under less than one of my mother’s friends. Nichole just handed this one a message to carry.
Posy’s smile falters. Just for a second. Then she recovers, says something polite and meaningless, and retreats across the store, already reaching for her phone.
The damage is done. Whatever she saw, my mother will know within the hour.
I should care about that.
I should care about a lot of things.
But Nichole is still standing there in that white dress, and she just faced down a society shark without flinching, and the only thing I can think about is the warmth of her skin under my fingers.
“We should go,” she says.
“Yes.”
Neither of us moves.
In the parking structure, I carry her bags because she won’t let the boy from the store do it. The concrete echoes around us, ordinary sounds in an ordinary place, and for one unguarded second I catch our reflection in the black glass of the car window.
This woman I bought a year of, laughing at something I said.
Me, looking at her like the year is not the point anymore.
That is the moment I understand I am in trouble.
Somewhere back in that mall, a woman in pearls is already deciding exactly how she will tell it at my mother’s table. I find that I do not care.
And that - not the dress, not the clasp, not the white - is the thing that should frighten me.