Love He Denied

Chapter 1

CHARLOTTE

The zipper snagged halfway up her spine, and Charlotte held her breath while Kate wrestled it over the spot where the lace overlay bunched against the satin lining.

"Don't move. Don't breathe. Don't even think about breathing."

"I'm turning blue, Kate."

"Beauty is pain." One final tug and the zipper glided home. Kate stepped back, hands raised like a surgeon who'd just saved a life. "There. Oh my god. There."

Charlotte turned to the mirror.

The woman staring back looked like someone she'd seen in a magazine once — someone with brown curls pinned into an elaborate updo that had taken a stylist and two assistants to construct, tendrils left loose around her face.

Her brown eyes were lined and luminous, her skin glowing under expensive foundation. She looked beautiful.

She looked like someone else.

The dress was a thing that belonged to someone else's life, too.

Ivory silk with a fitted bodice, a skirt that moved like water when she shifted her weight.

Dominic's mother had sent her to a boutique on the Upper East Side where the consultants spoke in murmurs and the cheapest gown was a year’s salary.

She'd tried to suggest something simpler — a tea-length dress, maybe, or something she could actually sit down in — but Ginnifer Weston had given her a look that said: absolutely not. Charlotte had stopped suggesting.

Now, Charlotte touched the beading along the neckline. Tiny crystals, hand-sewn. Hundreds of them. She thought about how long it must have taken someone to place each one.

"You look unreal," Kate said from behind her, chin hooked over her shoulder so they were both in the mirror. Kate's dark hair against Charlotte's brown strands. Kate's sharp face next to her softer one. "Like, offensively beautiful. I hate you a little."

"I look like I'm wearing a costume."

"You look like a bride, Charlie."

Charlotte stared at herself. Bride. The word still tripped something in her chest every time she heard it: a fizz of disbelief.

The disbelief hadn't faded in the four months since Dominic proposed.

Four months. She'd known him for six. Kate had opinions about that timeline, and she'd voiced them exactly once.

Charlotte had said when you know, you know, Kate had said do you, though? and they hadn't talked about it again.

She knew. She was almost sure she knew.

"Is Mom here yet?" Charlotte asked.

"Downstairs. Your dad's been pacing the lobby in his suit since seven a.m. He asked the concierge if the cufflinks were 'real gold or just gold-looking' and I think the man almost had a stroke."

Charlotte laughed. It loosened the tension in her shoulders. Her parents were here. Her dad was downstairs in a rented suit, baffled by the fancy hotel, proud and happy. This was real. This was happening.

Her phone buzzed on the vanity. She picked it up.

Dominic: Running a few minutes behind. See you out there.

She beamed. Typed back: I can't wait to marry you with a heart emoji, then deleted the emoji because Dominic didn't use emojis. She always felt faintly silly when she did.

His reply came ninety seconds later. A thumbs-up.

Kate saw her face. "What?"

"Nothing. He's running behind." She set the phone down and turned back to the mirror. Smoothed the front of the dress with both hands. "He's busy. There's a lot going on."

Kate nodded. She didn't say anything, which was Kate's version of saying a lot.

The bridal suite was on the fourteenth floor of the Whitley, a hotel Charlotte had walked past a hundred times on her way to the subway and never once imagined entering.

The bathroom had heated floors. The closet was larger than her classroom.

There were orchids on every surface, white and sculptural.

Charlotte had been afraid to touch them since she arrived.

Everything about today was like that: exquisite, slightly terrifying and not quite hers.

A knock on the door. Kate opened it and Charlotte's mother swept in, already crying, clutching a wadded tissue and a small velvet box.

"Oh, baby. Oh, look at you."

"Mom, don't — if you cry, I'll cry, and Kate just spent forty minutes on my eyes."

"Forty-five," Kate corrected.

Her mother held her at arm's length, studying her with an expression that was half wonder and half something else.

Something searching. Charlotte watched her mother take in the curls, the dress, the room.

She knew what her mother saw: her daughter, transformed into a version of herself that neither of them fully recognized.

"You're happy?" her mother asked. "You're really happy?"

"I'm really happy, Mom."

"Because you don't have to — I mean, I know everything has moved so quickly, and your father and I just want to make sure—"

"Mom." Charlotte took her hands. Squeezed. "I love him. He's a good man."

Her mother nodded and opened the velvet box. Inside was a pair of emerald earrings, small and luminous. "These were your grandmother's. Something old."

Charlotte put them on. They were warm against her neck, familiar in a way nothing else in this room was. In the mirror, they looked plain next to the crystal beading, next to the diamond studs Dominic had sent up that morning in a black box with no card.

"Have you heard from his family?" her mother asked, working to keep her voice casual.

"Ginnifer sent flowers." Charlotte gestured toward the arrangement on the side table. White roses, white lilies, a card that read Welcome to the family — G. The handwriting was a florist's, not his mother's. Charlotte had noticed. She'd chosen not to mind.

"And his father?"

"Roland doesn't really do warmth. But he shook Dad's hand at the rehearsal dinner, so that's basically a bear hug in Weston language."

Her mother laughed, but her eyes were still doing the searching thing.

Kate broke in, saving her. "Okay, final check. Dress, check. Hair, check. Makeup, gorgeous, check. Shoes?"

"By the door."

"Veil?"

"On the bed."

"Vows?"

Charlotte patted the pocket sewn into the lining of the skirt.

Her one contribution to the dress design, a hidden pocket for the folded paper where she'd written her vows in blue pen during a free period at school.

She'd written them at her desk while her fourth graders were at recess, the sounds of shouting and laughter floating through the window.

She'd cried a little, wiped her eyes and gone back to grading fractions.

"I wrote them myself," she'd told Dominic, shy about it. "Personal ones. Is that okay?"

"Whatever you want," he'd said, scrolling something on his phone. And then, looking up: "That's sweet, Charlotte. Really."

Charlotte. He always called her Charlotte. Everyone else in her life called her Charlie — Kate, her parents, her students, the barista at the coffee shop on Ninth Street who spelled it "Charlee" on her cup every morning.

Dominic called her Charlotte because that was her name on the seating chart, on the invitation, on the engraved napkins his mother had ordered. Charlotte Elizabeth Hoffman. It sounded like someone elegant, someone who belonged in this hotel, in this dress, in this family.

In reality, Charlie Hoffman was a fourth-grade teacher who ate cereal for dinner and whose apartment had a leak above the bathtub she'd fixed with duct tape. Charlotte was the woman Dominic proposed to. She was still trying to figure out if they were the same person.

"Earth to Charlie." Kate was snapping her fingers. "You in there?"

"Yeah. Sorry. Just taking it in."

Kate studied her. Kate was good at studying people: it was what made her a good teacher and an occasionally unbearable best friend.

She saw things Charlotte preferred to leave unexamined, and she usually had the grace to let them stay that way.

Today, though, there was a tightness around her mouth that meant she was holding something back.

"What?" Charlotte asked.

"Nothing." Kate handed her the bouquet — white peonies, lush and heavy, another Ginnifer selection. "You ready?"

Charlotte took the flowers. Looked at the mirror one more time. The woman looking back was stunning in a borrowed kind of way. Like the room, like the orchids, like the diamonds she'd left on the vanity. All of it beautiful. None of it hers.

She pushed the thought down. Deep, where it couldn't reach her. Not today.

"I'm ready," she said.

Kate opened the door.

Her father was waiting in the hallway, eyes already red, hands clasped in front of him like he was about to give a speech or catch a football.

The sight of him — this man in his rented suit with his too-short tie and his face crumpling the moment he saw her — broke through every layer of composure she'd built.

"Dad. Don't you dare."

"I'm not crying. It's allergies." He sniffed hard. Offered his arm. "You look like your mother the day I married her. Scared the hell out of me then, too."

She took his arm. The fabric of his jacket was stiff and unfamiliar under her hand. It wasn’t the cashmere and Italian wool of Dominic's world, but solid. Her father's arm, taking her somewhere.

They walked toward the elevator. Behind them, Kate carried the train of her dress. Below them, three hundred guests were waiting in a ballroom full of flowers, candles and place cards written in calligraphy by a woman who charged by the letter.

Charlotte's phone buzzed one more time. She glanced down.

Dominic:

She stared at it. Then she put her phone in Kate's hand and stepped into the elevator.

She told herself that a thumbs-up emoji was just how some people said I love you, that the tightness in her throat was just the dress, that the woman in the mirror was her, and that she was ready, and that she was happy.

She was happy.

She was.