14. Nichole
— ? —
Nichole
The gala is held in a ballroom that looks like it was designed by someone who had never heard the word “restraint.”
Gold everywhere - on the walls, the chandeliers, the frames of mirrors that stretch from floor to ceiling.
Light bounces off every surface, turning the room into something blinding and beautiful and slightly nauseating.
A ballroom full of people in evening wear, moving through the gleam like fish in an expensive aquarium.
I’m wearing the white dress again.
Callum didn’t ask me to. I chose it myself, standing in front of the closet full of clothes I still can’t quite believe belong to me, running my fingers over silks and satins that cost more than my old rent.
I chose white because it’s the one Genevieve looked at like a stain.
Because it’s the one Adelaide’s eyes narrowed at.
Because sometimes the bravest thing you can do is wear the thing they don’t want you to wear.
And because - though I won’t admit this, not even to myself - it’s the one Callum couldn’t stop looking at in that fitting room. The one that made him cross a room to touch me.
Not that I’m thinking about that.
Not that I’ve been thinking about anything else for days.
“There’s a seating chart,” Callum murmurs as we enter the ballroom. His hand is at my back again, guiding, proprietary. “My mother’s work. You’ll be four chairs down from me.”
“Four chairs?”
“Genevieve is between us.”
The words land like ice water.
I keep walking. I keep smiling. I keep my face perfectly arranged, because we’re in public and people are watching and I will not - will not - let them see that this bothers me.
It shouldn’t bother me.
We have a contract. A year. Separate beds, even if they’re in the same room now. This isn’t real. He doesn’t belong to me, and I don’t belong to him, and if Adelaide wants to put his ex-practically-fiancée at his elbow, that’s her prerogative.
It bothers me anyway.
The table is round, which means I can see everything. Every time Genevieve leans in to whisper something. Every time her hand brushes his sleeve. Every laugh, every smile, every moment she says we about things that happened in a life I wasn’t alive for.
“Remember the summer we all went to the Vineyard?” Genevieve is saying, her voice carrying just enough to reach me. “You were so sunburned your mother made you stay inside for three days. We played cards the whole time.”
“I remember,” Callum says. His voice is neutral. Polite. Giving nothing away.
“And the time at your father’s funeral - you wouldn’t talk to anyone, but you talked to me. You told me about the boat. Do you remember the boat?”
I don’t know what boat. I don’t know anything about Callum’s father except that he’s dead and no one talks about him.
I’m sitting four chairs away with a fork in my hand and a feeling in my chest I have absolutely no right to, and it burns - it burns - and I keep my face perfectly still because the whole room is waiting to watch it crack.
“Genevieve.” Callum’s voice has gone careful. “This isn’t the time.”
“I’m just reminiscing.” She smiles at him, all sweetness. “We have so many memories. Don’t we?”
“We have a history. That’s different.”
“Is it?”
Across the table, Adelaide is watching me. She’s holding a wine glass, not drinking, just watching. Waiting to see what I’ll do.
I set down my fork.
“Will you excuse me?” My voice comes out perfectly level. “I need some air.”
I don’t wait for a response. I push back from the table and walk - don’t run, don’t hurry, walk - toward the terrace doors at the far end of the ballroom.
Behind me, I feel the whole room turn to follow.
The terrace is quieter. Cooler. I stand at the railing and look out at the dark garden below and try to remember how to breathe like a normal person.
This is what they want. Adelaide and Genevieve and all of them - they want me to react. They want me to make a scene, to prove I don’t belong, to give them something they can point to and say see, she’s not one of us, she never was.
I won’t give them that.
I won’t-
“It is wonderful, what he’s done.”
I turn.
Genevieve has followed me out. Of course she has. She’s standing in the terrace doorway with a glass of champagne in her hand and that sweet, poisonous smile on her perfect face.
“Truly,” she continues, gliding toward me. “I think it’s wonderful. Callum has always had such a talent for taking in the ones who need saving.”
“Excuse me?”
“First a motherless little girl, now a girl off a bus.” She takes a sip of champagne, delicate, controlled. “He does love a stray.”
The word hits like a slap. Stray. Like I’m a dog. Like Olivia is a dog. Like we’re both charity cases that Callum collected because he couldn’t help himself.
“Careful,” I say.
“I’m being kind.” Genevieve’s eyes glitter in the low light. “Someone has to be. You clearly don’t understand how this world works.”
“And you’re going to explain it to me?”
“If you’ll let me.” She moves closer, close enough that I can smell her perfume - something expensive and floral and cloying. “He’ll get bored. He always does. I’ve watched him do it for fifteen years. The charity cases, the projects, the little fixer-upper people he thinks he can save.”
“I’m not a project.”
“Oh, sweetheart.” She laughs, a pretty, tinkling sound. “Of course you are. You’re the most ambitious project he’s ever taken on. A nobody from nowhere, transformed into Mrs. Lippitt. It’s his greatest work of fiction yet.”
My hands are shaking. I press them flat against my thighs, willing them to still.
“And when he gets bored - and he will, I’ve watched it happen over and over - I’d like us to still be friendly.” Genevieve’s smile sharpens. “Because I’ll still be here. I’ve always been here. And you…”
She doesn’t finish the sentence. She doesn’t have to.
Here is the thing Genevieve didn’t count on: I don’t flinch.
I have been condescended to by professionals.
I have been looked down on by landlords and bosses and welfare officers and every other person who’s ever had power over my life.
This woman, with her champagne and her family money and her fifteen years of watching from the sidelines - she is an amateur.
“You’ve watched him for fifteen years,” I say, quiet and even. “And he married me inside a month.”
The champagne glass freezes halfway to her lips.
“Sit with that on the drive home.”
Something ugly moves behind Genevieve’s beautiful face. A flash of real emotion, finally - not the polished performance, but the raw thing underneath. Her jaw tightens. Her eyes go hard.
And then the champagne is coming.
A full flute of it, cold and sharp, into my eyes and down my neck and into the front of my white dress. The shock of it steals my breath. Wine stings my eyes, drips from my chin, soaks through the fabric I chose because I thought it was armor.
“Oh, God, how clumsy of me.” Genevieve’s voice is loud now, carrying back into the ballroom where people have already started to turn. She’s smiling, radiant with malice. “You poor thing. Somebody find her a towel - she hasn’t got anything to change into, has she.”
People are watching.
Dozens of them, crowded near the terrace doors, glasses in hand, faces arranged in expressions of shocked concern that don’t hide the avid curiosity underneath. They’re waiting. Waiting to see what the nobody does now that she’s been put in her place.
I wipe one drop from my lashes with a single finger.
I look at Genevieve for a long, steady beat.
“Thank you,” I say. “It’s the most anyone’s spent on me all night.”
Then I walk.
I don’t scurry. I don’t flee. I walk past Genevieve, past the watching faces, past the cluster of people who part for me like I’m contagious. I keep my chin up and my spine straight and I let every single one of them watch me go.
The bathroom door closes behind me like a seal.
I lock it. I lean against it. And then, finally, alone, I let myself come apart.
Not over Genevieve.
Over the fact that for one stupid hour tonight, I let myself want to belong to him in a room like this.
Over the fact that I sat at that table and watched another woman touch his sleeve and felt something hot and terrible bloom in my chest. Over the fact that a glass of wine just reminded me what I actually am here - a line item, a project, a contract - and how cheaply it can all be taken back.
I grip the sink. I breathe. I fix my face.
I am very good at putting myself back together. I have had a lifetime of practice.
When I open the door, he’s there.
Callum. In the corridor, jacket already off, and he doesn’t ask if I’m all right because he watched the whole thing and he knows that I’m not.
“Arms up,” he says.
Before I can argue, he settles his jacket over my wet shoulders - careful, gentle, like I’m something that could break. No one has handled me like that in years. No one has looked at me the way he’s looking at me now, like the wine on my dress is a wound he wants to heal.
“We’re leaving,” he says.
“You can’t just-”
“Watch me.”
His voice is very low, very controlled, and underneath it something is shaking. Rage, maybe. Or something else. Something I don’t have a name for.
“I have shaken every hand in that room for thirty years,” he says. “Tonight I am going to walk out of it with my wife, and all of them are going to watch me choose you, and by breakfast that is the only thing anyone remembers about this party.”
He takes my hand.
He walks me back into the ballroom.
Not toward the doors - into the middle of it. Into the light, where every one of those watching faces can see. Where Genevieve is still standing with her empty glass and her perfect smile frozen on her face. Where Adelaide has gone very, very still at her table.
In the center of the ballroom, he stops.
He turns me by the hand.
He looks at me for one second like he’s asking a permission he does not intend to wait for.
“I’m sorry for this,” he says, low, only for me.
And then he kisses me.