CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Dress
The morning of his uncle’s rescheduled seventieth, I woke before the alarm, the particular fizzing alertness of a day I’d been building toward for three weeks, and lay there for a moment cataloging everything that still needed doing before I let myself get up.
The florist was due at nine. The final headcount had to go to the caterer by ten, after Aunt Rosalind’s housekeeper called at eight the night before to say she’d developed a shellfish allergy sometime in the last decade that nobody had bothered informing me of.
The band needed a run sheet. The seating chart, after four revisions, had a fifth problem I’d discovered at midnight, a second cousin’s new girlfriend who apparently could not, under any circumstances, be seated within sight of his ex-wife, information relayed to me by three different family members in three different versions.
I handled all of it before noon, moving through the house with the particular competence I only fully noticed in myself on days like this one, when the sheer volume of small decisions made it impossible not to see how much of the machinery I was actually running.
I directed the florist personally, standing in the ballroom while she and her assistants transformed it, peonies and eucalyptus exactly the combination I’d tracked down from an old photograph of his aunt’s wedding decades earlier.
I called the caterer myself about the allergy, rewrote two tables’ worth of hors d’oeuvres on the spot, and thanked the woman for her patience when she pointed out, not unkindly, that this was the third such change in two days.
Elena arrived at one to inspect, moving through the ballroom with her particular brand of critical appreciation, finding fault with the color of the tablecloths before conceding, grudgingly, that the flowers were lovely.
“You’ve outdone yourself,” she said, which from Elena counted as genuine praise, and I let myself feel a small flush of pride at it, foolish as that probably was.
Alessandra found me in the kitchen around two, Mia trailing behind her in a small party dress that made her look, for a moment, like any other happy child at a family celebration. “Can I help with anything? I feel useless just standing around.”
“You could help me with the place cards, if you don’t mind sitting for twenty minutes doing something tedious.”
We sat together at the kitchen island, writing names in careful calligraphy, and she asked me, at one point, whether I was nervous about tonight, and I admitted, surprising myself, that I was, a little, that anniversaries and celebrations always made me want everything to be perfect in a way that probably wasn’t entirely healthy.
“You care about this family a lot,” she said. “More than I think anyone here actually notices.”
“It’s fine. I like doing it.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
I looked up at her, something in her tone catching me off guard, genuine and a little too perceptive for comfort. “I don’t know,” I admitted. “Sometimes I think it would be nice if noticing wasn’t the whole point of doing it.”
She didn’t say anything else, but she reached over and squeezed my hand once, briefly, and I felt, in that moment, something like real solidarity between us, two women who understood, in different ways, what it cost to hold yourself steady inside a family this large and this demanding.
I spent nearly two hours getting ready that evening, longer than usual, humming to myself as I did my hair and makeup with unusual care.
I’d chosen a dress in deep emerald, the color Dante had once told me, years ago, was his favorite on me, off the shoulder, fitted through the waist, the kind of dress that made me feel, when I finally stood in front of the full-length mirror, beautiful rather than merely presentable.
Dante found me there, in the mirror, and stopped in the doorway of our bedroom with an expression that made the whole two hours worth it.
“Vivienne.” He crossed the room slowly, like he wanted to take his time arriving at me, and stopped close enough that I could feel the warmth of him.
“You look...” He shook his head, apparently unable to finish the sentence, and instead reached out to touch the curve of my bare shoulder, careful, reverent, the way he used to touch me in the earliest years, before familiarity had worn the edges smooth.
“You’re staring,” I said, echoing our old morning ritual, feeling something warm bloom in my chest.
“I’m allowed,” he said, and kissed my shoulder, then the side of my neck, careful not to disturb my hair or my lipstick, and for a moment, standing there in his hands, I let myself believe that tonight might be the night everything righted itself, that whatever had gone sideways over the past few weeks might simply dissolve in the face of an evening we’d built, in a sense, together.
“We’ll walk in together,” he said. “I promise you that.”
“I know.”
“Tonight’s going to be good, Vivienne. I mean that.”
I believed him completely, standing there in that dress with his hands still warm against my skin, because seven years of evidence had never once given me a real reason not to.
I was halfway through pinning a stray curl back into place, twenty minutes before we were meant to leave, when his assistant knocked on the door, apologetic enough that I knew before she said a word that the news wouldn’t be welcome.
“Mr. Moretti’s needed downstairs. There’s a situation with Mia’s school, something about a car circling the block during pickup this afternoon. Security wants him to review the footage before deciding whether to escalate.”
“Now? Tonight?”
“He asked me to tell you he’ll be as quick as he can.”
I finished my hair alone after that, my hands slightly less steady than they’d been ten minutes earlier, and I told myself, sitting there at the vanity, that this was reasonable, that a threat against a child’s safety obviously outranked a party, that any decent person would understand that without needing to be told twice.
I waited in the hallway once I was fully dressed, watching the clock climb past the hour we were meant to leave.
Six forty. Six fifty. I told myself he’d be down any minute, that the footage review couldn’t possibly take this long, that he’d promised.
I checked my phone. No message. I sat on the top step, my emerald dress pooling around me, and watched the minutes climb toward seven fifteen, then seven twenty, feeling increasingly foolish for the two hours I’d spent making myself beautiful for an evening that had apparently already started proceeding without either of us.
At seven thirty, one of the household staff came to find me, apologetic, to say that guests had begun arriving and perhaps I should go down.
I stood at the top of the stairs for a moment, looking down into the foyer, already filling with the low hum of arriving guests, and I understood that whatever this evening had been supposed to be, it was not going to unfold the way either of us had promised each other twenty minutes earlier.
I went down alone, smiling for the photographer stationed near the entrance, greeting the first arrivals with the particular warmth I’d perfected over seven years of exactly this kind of hosting, explaining, gently, that my husband had been unavoidably delayed but would be down shortly.
I said it once, then twice, then a third time, each repetition costing a little more than the last, until I’d said it so many times the words had started to feel like something worn smooth from overuse.
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