Chapter 7
Seven
I should be walking down the aisle right about now.
I know because Matilda gave me a laminated schedule yesterday. According to that, the processional music should be playing. The guests should be standing. Three hundred heads should be swiveling toward the back of the church in coordinated anticipation.
Instead, I’m sitting on a marble bathroom floor in a satin robe with my back against the bathtub, knees pulled to my chest, staring at the eucalyptus diffuser on the counter.
It’s a very nice diffuser.
Ezra must be standing at that altar, waiting.
His jaw will be clenched, doing that thing it does when he’s furious but trying to stay composed.
It’s that subtle look, the one I’ve learned to read from across a room.
He’ll be smiling at the guests, but the smile won’t reach his eyes.
His best man will be leaning in, murmuring something low.
His mother will be in the front row, stiff-spined, cursing me in her head.
I know all of this, and I still can’t get off this floor.
My legs have made a decision that my brain can’t override.
The noise outside the door stopped a while ago, but silence in my family means they’re up to something. Silence is a strategy.
The door handle wiggles.
I watch it.
It wiggles again.
Then there’s a soft, mechanical click, and the door swings open.
My father is standing in the doorway. Behind him, the suite is empty. I don’t know where everyone went, but he’s alone.
He looks at me on the floor and gives me a sad smile. It’s soft at the corners, the one that has made me feel simultaneously better and worse since I was about four years old.
“Hi there, baby.”
Something in my chest folds in half.
“How did you—"
“Picked the lock.” He leans against the frame. “Four kids, one bathroom, and your mother whenever she was having a bad day. I learned fast. Rowan once threatened to live in there. I had to talk her out of it for forty-five minutes.”
Despite everything, I feel the corner of my mouth move.
He crosses the bathroom and lowers himself to the floor beside me, exhaling when he lands, his legs stretched out in front of him, dress shirt and all.
“I asked them to give us a few minutes.” He glances sideways at me. “Your mother is in the hallway. She’s praying. Madison’s with her. Rowan is—”
“Enjoying herself?”
“Enormously,” he confirms.
I pull my knees in tighter. Outside the window, the small coastal town where we’re having the wedding is filled with people enjoying a normal Saturday, not doing anything as monumental as this.
Must be nice.
Dad doesn’t fill the silence. He never has. He’s always been the kind of man who understands that some silences need to run their course before they become conversations, and I’ve always loved him for it.
“You don’t have to do anything,” he says finally.
My throat tightens.
“Dad—”
“I mean it. Whatever you decide in this room, we’ll go with it. All of us. That’s it.”
My eyes prickle with tears.
“Do you love him?” Dad asks.
The question settles in the room.
“Yes,” I breathe.
And I do. I think.
That’s the complicated truth of it. There’s a version of Ezra I fell in love with, and I still reach for it even when it isn’t there.
“But?” Dad says.
He heard it. He always hears it.
But is sitting right there on my tongue, the whole weight of it, and for a second, I can feel it wanting out.
How I never feel like quite enough. How his family looks at me like I’m a problem they’re tolerating.
How the wedding I’m getting married at today doesn’t have a single detail in it that I chose, not really, not freely, not without the quiet understanding that the other option was a conversation I didn’t want to have.
How I can’t remember the last time I said what I actually thought and felt safe after.
How sometimes I catch myself in a mirror and don’t recognize the woman looking back at me, and I think, Good, maybe she’ll do better than I have.
It’s right there, but I close my mouth around it.
Because if I say it, I can see exactly what happens next.
I can see my father’s face, and I can picture the way my family—who love me fiercely, sometimes loudly, sometimes in ways that make everything more complicated—will carry that information.
There’s a stubborn, unmoving part of me that’s not ready to let them hold it.
I want to be the one to make this work. To prove something, even if I couldn’t tell you anymore what or to whom.
I press my lips together.
“Nothing,” I say. “Never mind.”
Dad looks at me for a long moment. “The morning your mother and I got married, I was sick in the church car park.”
I look at him.
“Twice,” he adds. “Your uncle held my jacket and told me I needed to have more respect for myself.” He smiles at the memory.
“Your mother was twenty minutes late. I thought she wasn’t coming.
Standing up there, sweating through my shirt, your grandmother was giving me a look from across the aisle as if she’d always suspected I wasn’t good enough. Then the doors opened.”
I watch the side of his face.
“She was… God.” He shakes his head. “I forgot every bit of it. All the nerves. Everything.”
I don’t want to tell him that I know the story is supposed to land on me like a promise, but instead, it lands like a question I don’t know how to answer.
“Do you know,” he says, changing course the way he does, “that you used to sing before you could talk properly?”
He always tells me this story.
“I’ve always been proud of you,” he says. “I want you to know that. The music, the career, the way you… all of it.”
“Dad—”
“I know we weren’t always easy.”
Before Mom found the right medication for her Bipolar, the right combination, and a doctor willing to listen, adjust, and try again, things were unpredictable.
I understood early on that I needed to be the easy child, which meant keeping myself small and quiet just to maintain a steady atmosphere at home.
Noah and Madison took on what they could handle.
Rowan had her own pain that couldn’t be named, and everyone around her was always trying to figure out how to help.
There was never a good time to add to the pile.
I learned that early on, and it seems I never unlearned it.
“I just worry,” Dad continues, “that somewhere along the way, in all of it—our stuff, the family stuff—you lost your voice.”
I hate how accurate that is.
I hate that he can see it and name it in thirty seconds on a bathroom floor when I’ve spent years convinced I was fine.
I hate that I walked straight from one dynamic into another and called it a fresh start.
I look down at my hands. They’re still for the first time all morning.
“When I met Ezra,” I say slowly, not sure where I’m going with this, “I wanted it to be different. The family we’d make. I love you all. You know I do. But I didn’t want to be waiting for the next hard thing. I wanted something that felt—”
Quiet. Predictable. Safe.
I don’t say any of that.
“—settled,” I finish.
Dad nods but doesn’t offer a response.
I take a long breath in through my nose and look at him.
“I should get dressed,” I say.
Something moves across his face. He covers it quickly, but I see it. Twenty-eight years of watching this face means I see all of it.
“You’re sure?” he asks.
“I’m sure, Dad.” I nod once. “It’s the right thing to do.”
His mouth does something that’s not quite a smile.
We both push ourselves up off the floor, and he extends a hand to help me for the last bit.
For a moment we stand in the bathroom together, his hand holding mine.
I think about how this might be one of the last times I’ll be his Piper without also being Ezra’s wife.
The thought comes, and I let it pass because I don’t have anywhere useful to put it.
I roll my shoulders back.
Then I push my mouth upward, into the right shape, into the shape that tells everyone what they came here to see.
I take a breath in and let it out. “Time to get married.”
Dad’s face does the thing again.
I turn toward the door before I have to look at it any longer.