Prologue #4
It’s as if she’s pulled the pin on a grenade I’ve been clenching in my chest. The dam breaks.
A sob, raw and ugly, tears out of me, followed by a torrent of tears I can’t control.
The careful, “luminous” makeup dissolves into streaks of black and beige, turning me into a raccoon-eyed mess.
The forty-two-thousand-dollar silk bodice darkens in ugly pinprick patches where my tears fall.
“I can’t,” I choke out, the words barely audible. “Eileen, I can’t marry him. But…there are three hundred people. The photographers. The planning…it’s been a year. My parents have spent…my God, they could have bought an island. The flowers alone…I don’t know how to—”
“Annie.” Her voice is an anchor. She squeezes my hands, hard. “Look at me, love.”
I force my blurry gaze up to meet hers. They are the same calm, serious green that held mine when I was ten, confessing through guilty tears that I’d shattered my mother’s Lalique vase during a forbidden game of indoor tag.
“You can leave,” she states, simple and immutable as a fact of nature. “You can walk out that door right now and never look back.”
“I can’t just—” The objection dies in my throat, crushed under the weight of it all—the expectations, the money, the sheer, terrifying scene it would cause.
“Yes,” she insists, her voice low and fierce.
“You can.” She lets go of my hands and turns to the garment bag.
The zipper’s sound is loud in the quiet room.
From inside, she doesn’t pull out a backup dress or a veil.
She retrieves a faded, well-worn canvas tote bag, the kind given away at a bookstore with a minimum purchase.
It looks wildly out of place in this opulent room.
She presses it into my arms. It has a satisfying, purposeful weight.
“Your birth certificate. Your Social Security card. Your passport,” she lists, her voice hurried but clear. “Five thousand dollars in cash—my savings from the last few years. And if you try to give me one word of argument about it, I will be very cross.”
I stare from the humble bag to her face, comprehension dawning with a dizzying rush. “You knew,” I whisper, my voice trembling with a new kind of shock. “You knew I wouldn’t go through with it.”
“I hoped you wouldn’t.”
“How?” The word is a plea. “How did you know?”
Her expression softens, a world of love and worry in her eyes.
She reaches up and tucks a tear-dampened strand of hair behind my ear, her touch infinitely gentle.
“Annie, I’ve watched you with him for two years.
I’ve watched the light in you get dimmer and dimmer.
I’ve watched you fold yourself up smaller and smaller to fit into the box he and this life require, until I barely recognized the fierce, funny girl I helped raise.
” She pauses, her thumb stroking over my knuckles in a gesture more maternal than any I’ve ever received.
“I knew you couldn’t marry a man like that.
Or maybe I just prayed to every saint I know that you wouldn’t. ”
A fresh wave of tears come, these born of relief and a profound, aching love for this woman.
“We don’t have much time,” Eileen whispers, urgency cutting through her voice. “Listen closely. George is waiting in the limousine at the service entrance—the one the caterers have been using. No one’s watching that side. He’ll take you straight to LAX.”
“George?” His name is a lifeline. George Cartwright, our family driver for over a decade—a gentle, quiet man with a crinkled smile who taught me gin rummy in the back of the town car during endless premiere nights, who always had a Werther’s caramel for me in his pocket, who sent me a birthday card every single year, filled with terrible puns that never failed to make me laugh.
In another life, he would have been the grandfather who took me fishing.
“He knows?” I ask, my heart swelling.
“Aye, he does,” Eileen confirms, a faint, proud smile touching her lips. “Said it would be his honor to be your getaway driver.”
Fresh tears smear whatever’s left of my eyeliner. I wipe at them with the back of my hand. “Eileen, if my mother finds out you did this, she’ll fire you. She’ll make sure you never work in California again. You know how she is.”
“Elaine Collier’s never frightened me a day in my life, and she won’t start now,” Eileen squeezes my hands one last time.
“But I’m heading home for Ireland anyway.
Tomorrow morning’s flight. My girls have been begging me for years—my daughters, with their busy lives and my grandsons growing like weeds.
Jamie’s ten already, can you believe it?
I’ve missed his whole childhood practically.
I’m afraid I’ve missed too much already. ”
The words land like a punch to the gut, knocking the air out of me. Fresh sobs hitch in my chest. “You’re—you’re leaving? Tomorrow?”
“Aye, love.”
“But you didn’t say anything—” A new, selfish grief claws its way up my throat, and I know it’s childish but I feel it all the same.
“I didn’t want to pile on before the wedding.” She cups my cheek, her palm warm and soft, like all those nights she chased away nightmares. “But now…well, there won’t be a wedding, will there?”
I press my hand over hers, holding it against my face. “If you’re going back to Ireland, then this is goodbye, I guess. For a long time.”
I can’t bring myself to say forever. The word tastes like a finality I can’t stomach—like the click of a disconnected line, the echo of footsteps fading down an empty corridor, the wrenching sight of a loved one swallowed by the crowd at a departure gate.
“Do you remember what I used to tell you when you were a little girl?” Eileen asks. “When you’d visit me in Galway on your holidays and cry at the airport when it was time for you to leave before I came back?”
I nod, the memory flooding back through the haze—me at eight, clutching her skirt at Shannon Airport, snot-nosed and heartbroken, not wanting to trade her stone cottage by the sea and fairy stories for the sterile echo of our Pacific Palisades mansion. “Slán is never forever.”
“That’s right, darling. Goodbye’s never forever—not with love in the mix.
” She smooths my hair back, tucking the same stubborn strand behind my ear, even as it springs free again.
“You’ll write. I’ll send letters back, full of gossip from the village and photos of the boys.
We’ll sort it out, like we always have.”
“I don’t know if I’m brave enough without you,” I whisper, the truth spilling out raw. “Eileen, you’ve been everything—my rock, my secret-keeper, you’ve been the only person who actually—”
“None of that nonsense.” Her voice turns fierce, a rare edge that brooks no argument.
“You’re strong as they come, Annie Collier.
I know because I helped build that spine of yours, despite what the fancy folk downstairs might claim.
I watched you stand up to bullies at school, chase dreams at Stanford, hold your own in a world that tried to box you in.
You’re brave, incredible, and full of a quiet fire that burns longest.” Her eyes glisten now, but her smile breaks through.
“It’s why I stuck around so long, putting off Ireland.
I had to be sure you’d be alright. But now?
I see it clear as day—you’ll be more than alright. You’ll be magnificent.”
She pats my cheek, a gentle pat-pat that feels like a benediction. “But the clock’s ticking, mo chroí. Change, and be quick about it.”
My fingers fumble for the zipper, trembling like leaves in a storm, but Eileen’s already there.
The bodice releases its cruel grip and I draw in a full, ragged breath—the first real one in hours, maybe days.
She helps me step out, and the dress pools on the tile like a deflated dream, forty-two thousand dollars worth of silk and seams abandoned on Italian tile.
Eileen rummages in the garment bag with the efficacy of someone who’s packed school lunches and emergency kits for two decades, pulling out clothes that feel like a hug from my past self.
Faded Levi’s, soft from a hundred washes, ones that mold to my body like they’ve never forgotten me.
A plain white Gap tee, straight from the multi-pack, no frills, just comfortable cotton.
My old denim jacket, elbows worn thin from late-night cram sessions at Stanford.
Gleaming white Keds, the canvas still bright and unscuffed, as if they’ve been waiting for this exact moment.
And—bless her—a dark blue velvet scrunchie.
“Where’d you get these?” I ask, already shimmying into the jeans. They settle on my hips, a bit looser than a few months ago from the stress that’s worn me down.
“Your closet, buried in the back—the stuff you wear when no one’s around to critique.
” She hands over the tee, and I yank it on, half-laughing at how absurd it feels to be careful with my hair when everything’s about to come undone anyway.
The jacket slides over my shoulders next, and I catch the faint scent of old perfume clinging to the collar, a ghost of college nights spent dreaming bigger than this scripted life.
I plop onto the settee to lace up the Keds, the canvas squeaking faintly under my fingers, and Eileen’s already at work on my hair, her touch gentle but insistent.
Bobby pins rain down one by one, clinking onto the cushion.
With each pull, the weight lifts—literally, from my scalp, and figuratively, from my chest. My dark waves cascade down my back, frizzy and wild from the hairspray, and the relief hits like a cool breeze after a too-hot day.
I could cry again, but these tears would be different—grateful, maybe even a little triumphant.
“What about my stuff?” Panic spikes sharp in my chest, my voice pitching up. “Clothes, books, that box of old letters under my bed—all my things at the house. I can’t just leave them behind.”