22. The Dress
The Dress
RACHEL
Four days.
I have four days to design and build a wedding dress.
I've survived a federal conspiracy, an international surveillance operation, and Fawn Moreau. Four days should be manageable.
It is not manageable.
I'm sitting on the floor of the hotel suite at six in the morning with fabric swatches fanned around me like a very expensive mess, my sketchbook open across my knees, and the particular clarity that only comes from not having slept enough.
Connor is asleep in the bedroom. The Pacific is doing something extraordinary outside the window, all early light and restless water, and I am drawing the dress I want to wear when I marry the most impossible man I've ever met.
Clean lines. Ivory silk. Nothing that competes with the view.
Something that moves.
I sketch for an hour before I call Pierre.
He answers on the second ring, which means he was already awake, which means he already knows something is happening because Pierre always knows.
"Rachel." His voice carries the particular mixture of affection and resignation he reserves exclusively for me. "What have you done."
"I need a dress."
"Of course you do."
"In four days."
Silence. Then, carefully: "How much of it exists currently."
"A sketch."
"A sketch," he repeats, as though he is deciding whether to laugh or weep. "One sketch. Four days. For your wedding dress."
"The beading and embroidery can be simple. Clean lines. I want ivory silk, the weight we used for the Valentina piece, and I need it to move when I walk. Not float. Move."
I hear him exhale through his nose. The sound of a man recalibrating.
"The silk is in Paris," he says.
"Can you get it to Los Angeles by tomorrow morning?"
Another pause. "I can get it to Los Angeles by tonight if I call Margaux at the fabric house and remind her of the favor she owes me from the Lyon collection."
"Will she do it?"
"She will be extremely annoyed and then she will do it."
"Perfect. Pierre, I need you here."
"I am already looking at flights."
I close my eyes briefly. "Thank you."
"Don't thank me. When this is over you owe me a bottle of Pétrus and a month without impossible requests."
"Two bottles," I say. "You've earned two."
He hangs up without saying goodbye, which means he's already making calls.
I look at the sketch in my lap.
Simple. Uncluttered. A dress that says I know exactly who I am and I chose this with both eyes open. The kind of dress you build when you're not performing for anyone.
Connor appears in the bedroom doorway. Hair wrecked, coffee in hand, wearing the expression he gets when he's been awake longer than he's letting on.
"You've been up all night," he says.
"I've been designing."
He crosses to the window and looks at the swatches around me. Studies the sketch without touching it. He does that, I've noticed. Looks before he reaches for anything. As though he's learned to ask permission without using words.
"It's beautiful," he says.
"It's four days away from existing."
"Those are different problems."
I look up at him. The morning light is doing something unfair to the lines of his face, all that quiet certainty, and I think about four days from now when I will stand across from him on a rooftop and make promises in front of everyone we love.
"Sit with me," I say.
He lowers himself to the floor beside me, coffee between both hands, our shoulders touching. We look at the Pacific together for a moment.
"My parents flight lands this afternoon," I say.
"I know. Eddie's collecting them."
"You arranged that already."
"Last night."
I lean my head briefly against his shoulder. He doesn't make anything of it, which is exactly right.
"Four days," I say again.
"Enough time," he says.
I'm not sure if he means the dress or everything else. Probably both. That's how Connor communicates, in statements that carry more than one meaning, trusting me to find all of them.
"Collin proposes to Shari tonight," he says.
My head comes up. "You know about that?"
"He called me from the beach." Connor's expression does something warm and slightly undone, the look he gets when Collin is involved and he thinks I'm not watching closely enough to notice. "He wanted to know if I thought she'd say yes."
"What did you tell him?"
"I told him the answer has been yes for three years and he was the last one to figure it out."
I laugh. It comes out bright and genuine and a little wet at the edges because I'm tired and happy and four days away from the rest of my life.
Connor's thumb traces my knuckle, absent and certain.
"Double wedding," I say.
"If they want it."
"They'll want it." I look at the sketch again. "Which means I need to call Pierre back about a second dress."
"Shari's dress is handled," Connor says.
I stare at him. "What do you mean it's handled."
"I called her this morning while you were sketching. She has something in mind. I connected her with the hotel's styling team last night as a contingency."
"As a contingency," I repeat slowly. "You planned for a double wedding before Collin proposed."
"I planned for several possibilities."
"Connor."
"It's not controlling," he says, with the tone of a man who has been working very hard on the distinction. "It's preparing for something I hoped would happen."
I look at him for a long moment.
"No," I agree. "It's not controlling." I take the coffee from his hands and drink some of it. "It's loving. There's a difference."
He's quiet for a moment.
Then he says, with the particular care of someone placing something fragile in the light: "I'm still learning that."
"I know." I hand the coffee back. "You're doing well."
The silk arrives at seven that evening, which is exactly the kind of miracle that happens when you know the right people and those people know the right favors to call in.
Pierre arrives forty minutes later looking like a man who has fought three airports and won, his travel bag over one shoulder and a garment bag over the other that he refuses to let anyone else carry.
My mother and father arrive at seven-fifteen.
She called me from the plane somewhere over the Pacific.
Said my father had specifically reminded her, from his armchair in Hanoi with his bruised hip and his full authority, that Connor had been instructed to bring me back for dress fittings.
Since the dress was now apparently happening in Los Angeles, they were coming to Los Angeles.
His exact words, she told me, were: “someone has to make sure it's done properly.”
She is here to make sure it's done properly.
She walks through the hotel suite door and stops.
Takes in the silk on the cutting table. The sketch pinned to the board. Pierre already examining the fabric with the focused expression of a man who has been handed something worth his time.
Then she sets down her bag, removes her jacket, and says in Vietnamese: "Where do you need me?"
Pierre looks at her over his glasses.
"You sew?" he asks.
"Since I was six," she says in careful English. "Hand-stitching, embroidery, beadwork. I'm fast and I'm precise."
Pierre studies her for three full seconds. Then he pulls a chair to the cutting table and gestures at it. "The hem. I need someone I can trust with the hem."
My mother sits, takes the fabric he offers, and threads a needle in one smooth motion that makes Pierre blink.
He looks at me.
"Your mother," he says, as though this explains many things about me that have long confused him.
"My mother," I confirm.
We work through the evening.
The suite fills with the particular atmosphere of people doing something that matters, focused and unhurried, the work creating its own rhythm.
Pierre cuts. My mother hems. I work the bodice seams and we talk, the three of us, in that easy switching between languages that happens when conversation matters more than which words carry it.
My mother tells Pierre about the fabric market in Hanoi where she learned to sew.
Pierre tells my mother about the Lyon atelier where he trained.
I listen to both of them and work the silk and think about Connor arranging a car for my mother's airport pickup before I thought to ask, Collin on a Malibu beach tonight going down on one knee, and the rooftop at Paséa four days from now when everything we've survived becomes something we're choosing.
Connor brings food at nine. Vietnamese pho from a place he found two miles away that my mother immediately declares acceptable, which from her is high praise.
He sets the containers on the side table, fills bowls without being asked, leaves a cup of tea at my mother's elbow without interrupting her work.
She watches him do this. Catches my eye across the table.
Says nothing. Smiles just enough that only I see it.
At eleven, my phone lights up. Collin.
One word: Yes.
I show the screen to Connor. He reads it. Something crosses his face that he doesn't try to hide, relief and joy and the particular expression of a man watching his brother get everything he deserves.
"Double wedding," I say.
"Double wedding," he agrees.
I call Shari.
She answers on the first ring and her voice has the quality of a woman who has been crying and doesn't mind admitting it. "He did it on the beach," she says. "In the moonlight. With the most embarrassing speech I've ever heard."
"Was it good?"
"It was perfect." A pause. "I cannot believe I'm calling you from Malibu to tell you I'm engaged."
"I cannot believe you're going to be my sister-in-law."
She laughs. The real laugh, warm and unhidden. "Four days?"
"Four days. Can you make it work?"
"Rachel." Her voice settles into something certain. "I've been making impossible things work my entire career. Four days is fine." Another pause. "What do I wear?"
"Already handled," I say. "Connor arranged a styling team. Call the hotel concierge in the morning."
Silence on the line.
"He arranged that before Collin proposed," she says.
"Yes."
"Your fiancé is terrifying."
"My fiancé is thorough," I say. "There's a difference."
Her laugh is warm and a little wet at the edges. "See you in four days, sister."
We hang up. Pierre raises his gaze from the hem long enough to look at me.
"Good news?" he asks.
"Double wedding," I say.
He closes his eyes briefly. "Of course. Why would anything be simple." Then he goes back to his work, which is his version of celebrating.
My mother doesn't look up from the silk. "I like her," she says. "Shari."
"You've never met her."
"I can tell from your voice when you talk about her." She pulls a stitch through with the practiced ease of someone who has been doing this for fifty years. "She's someone you trust. You don't have many of those."
She's not wrong.
The dress takes shape over the next three days in the way that real things take shape, gradually and then suddenly.
By the second evening Pierre declares the silk is behaving.
By the third morning my mother's hem stitches are so precise that Pierre examines them three times and says nothing, which from him is the highest possible praise.
Connor stays out of the suite during working hours and appears in the evenings with food and the particular gift of knowing when to be present and when to leave space. My mother watches this with the quiet attention she brings to everything that matters.
On the third evening she finds me alone in the kitchen and says: "He watches you the way your father watches me."
My throat closes.
"I know," I manage.
"Then you understand what I'm telling you."
I do. Thirty-five years of her father's hand finding hers without looking. The trellis he built because she wanted jasmine. The coffee balanced on his chest in the pool. All of it distilled into one sentence.
She pats my hand and goes back to the silk.
The rehearsal dinner is on the rooftop the evening before the wedding. Fairy lights strung from the pergola columns. The Pacific a dark suggestion beyond the terrace railing. Paséa's rooftop glowing warm against the Huntington Beach evening.
Collin and Shari arrive together. She's wearing his ring and the ease of a woman who has stopped bracing for the next blow, and she and I find each other across the terrace immediately, the way women who understand each other do.
"You look happy," I tell her.
"I am," she says, like it still surprises her. "It's strange."
"You'll get used to it."
She looks at Collin across the terrace, laughing at something Connor said, the twin ease between them visible from twenty feet away. Then she looks at Connor.
Then at me.
"We got lucky," she says quietly.
"We chose well," I say. "There's a difference."
She raises her glass to that.
The dinner moves through toasts that make everyone laugh and cry in the same breath.
Brooklyn speaks about her brothers with the particular honesty of someone who has seen them at their worst and loves them harder for it.
My father, hip bruised but upright and immovable as always, stands and delivers three sentences about Connor that silence the entire terrace.
Connor doesn't trust his voice for a full minute after.
My mother watches the whole evening from her seat beside my father, her hand in his the way it has been for thirty-five years, and at one point she catches my eye across the terrace and lifts her glass just slightly.
I lift mine back.
At the end of the evening, Connor finds me at the railing. The ocean is invisible in the dark but audible, steady and patient.
"Tomorrow," he says.
"Tomorrow."
He takes my hand. We stand there for a moment, looking at where the water would be if we could see it.
"Are you scared?" I ask.
"Of marrying you?" He considers it with the seriousness he brings to things that deserve it. "No. Of everything that comes after, all of it, every day of it?" A pause. "Completely."
"Good," I say.
"Good?"
"That means you understand what it is."
He brings my hand up and presses his lips to my knuckles, the gesture he's been making since Hanoi, slow and deliberate and entirely his.
"Get some rest," he says. "I'll see you up here tomorrow."
He goes inside.
I stay at the railing for another moment, feeling the sea air, thinking about ivory silk and jasmine gardens and a man who took his shoes off at my parents' door without being asked.
Then I go in.
Tomorrow, I marry Connor Grey.
I cannot wait.
But at 2:17 AM, my phone lights up.
A text from a number I don't recognize.
Congratulations on the wedding, Ms. Nguyen.
Pity Marc won't be there to celebrate.
He sends his regards.
I sit up in the dark.
The screen glows in my hand.
And somewhere in the city below Huntington Beach, Marc Duval's disappearance stops feeling like an ending.
It starts feeling like a beginning.