43. Lydia
LYDIA
The zipper sticks halfway up my spine. Giorgia laughs under her breath and works it free with two fingers.
"Hold still," she says. "You're worse than a cat in a bath."
"I'm nervous."
"You're not," my mother says. "You're happy. Different thing."
Bianca stands behind me in the mirror, her hands steady on my shoulders. Six months ago steady hands from her would have been a rumor. Now she's here, upright, color in her face, close enough that I can smell the perfume she's worn since I was a girl.
She smooths a curl back from my temple and tucks it into the pins Giorgia already set.
"There," she says. "Now you look like you."
The dress fits. That's the part I keep circling back to, small and enormous at once.
It fits through the shoulders and fits loose enough over the curve of my stomach.
Nobody pinned anything at midnight, no seamstress muttering that it would have to do.
I picked this dress. I stood in a shop three months ago, turned in front of a mirror, and said yes, this one. Nobody told me what yes meant.
Last time the fabric didn't fit and neither did I. Last time I walked a path I didn't choose with no shoes on, cold stone under my feet, and I told myself the whole way that a funeral would have felt more honest.
This time my feet are in ivory heels Bella picked out and made me practice walking in for two weeks straight.
"You're crying already," Giorgia says, not unkindly, and hands me a tissue before I've even felt the sting behind my eyes.
"I'm not."
"You are. Dab, don't rub."
Bianca catches my eye in the mirror and doesn't say anything at all. She doesn't have to. We both know what today is standing on top of, and we both know we're not going to talk about it, not today. Today gets to just be this.
My phone buzzes on the vanity. Bella, from downstairs. He's already crying. Anastasio's filming it. Get down here before he ruins his own wedding.
I laugh, and Bianca hands me the tissue back.
Bianca takes my arm at the top of the aisle. Her grip is sure, no tremor in it at all, and something in my chest goes loose and warm at the simple fact of that.
"Ready?" she asks.
"Yes."
No hesitation. I check for it, out of old habit, some leftover instinct that expects to find a knot of dread waiting under the word. There's nothing there. Just yes.
The doors open onto a room full of people who came because they wanted to, not because refusal wasn't an option.
Bella in the second row, already pressing a knuckle under her eye.
Anastasio beside her, phone held sideways, grinning, saying something to Bella that makes her swat his arm without taking her eyes off me.
Giorgia near the back, hands folded, dressed nicer than I've ever seen her, watching with the plain, steady attention of someone who chose to be here.
There's a gap in the second row where a chair sits empty.
Nobody filled it. Nobody needed to. I feel it for exactly one breath, the shape of a woman still in Capri, a thousand miles from this room.
Then Bianca's hand tightens on my arm, and I let the thought go where it belongs, which is somewhere quiet and not today.
Nico stands at the end of the aisle in a dark suit, no tie, top button open. His scar catches the light when he turns his head. His eyes are already wet.
I walk toward him on my mother's arm, and it takes every count of the music not to rush.