Chapter 6
Chapter six
Tessa
Asaleswoman glides toward me the moment I step through the door, moving with the calm of someone who has personally prevented at least three mothers-of-the-bride from staging emotional collapses before lunch.
"Welcome. Are you here with a party?"
“The Maddox bridal appointment,” I say, and recognition flickers across her face so quickly it feels rehearsed.
She turns at once with a murmured of course and leads me through a forest of ivory and blush, past beaded sleeves, satin trains, and enough tulle to smother a small village, toward a low velvet seating area at the back of the boutique.
I smell the champagne before I see the group, something dry and faintly floral cutting through the heavier boutique air of pressed fabric, cedar hangers, and expensive hopes.
A cluster of women stand gathered around a tall mirror and a rolling rack of gowns, and every single head turns toward me in perfect, terrible unison when the saleswoman gestures and announces, “The Maddox party.”
For one brief second, I consider pretending I took a wrong turn and wandered in here by accident.
Then the tallest woman steps forward—dark hair swept back, coral lipstick, bright curious eyes that take me in with undisguised interest—and says, "Yes?"
"Hi." I produce what I hope passes for a normal smile and not the expression of a woman actively panicking in tasteful shoes. "I'm Tessa. George's girlfriend."
She blinks once. Then again. Something sharp and delighted clicks into place behind her eyes.
"Wait," she says slowly. "Tessa. From ERS?"
The older woman beside her—elegant, composed, with George's exact grey eyes set in a face that has clearly never entertained a careless thought—looks sharply between us. My stomach performs a small, unhelpful freefall.
"Yes," I say.
There's a short silence while the room rearranges itself around this new information.
Then Eleanor's face lights up like someone threw a switch, warm, sudden and genuinely delighted. "Oh my goodness," she says. "George and Tessa."
I open my mouth to clarify approximately seven things simultaneously and produce, instead, a sound not unlike a small animal meeting an unfortunate end. It escapes before I can stop it. Nothing in my professional life has prepared me for this.
Eleanor waves a hand as though the noise was perfectly reasonable. "That explains all the secrecy," she says, already delighted with herself. "Office romance."
Apparently this tidy explanation satisfies everyone in the room except me, which seems deeply unfair.
“Well,” Eleanor continues, looping her arm through mine with the easy confidence of someone who has already decided we like each other, “now that we’ve solved that mystery, welcome to dress shopping.”
She turns us both toward the elegant woman with George’s eyes. “This is Margaret, my mum. Mother, this is Tessa.”
Margaret Maddox extends her hand and shakes mine with a firmness that says she forms opinions quickly, keeps most of them to herself, and misses very little.
Her gaze makes me feel faintly transparent, as though she has already flipped to the back of the book and is now deciding whether the middle is worth her time.
"George speaks very highly of you," she says, which could be a compliment or an opening move in a longer game, and I genuinely cannot tell which.
I say something gracious in return, or at least something arranged in the shape of graciousness, and feel the word girlfriend sitting in my mouth like a smooth stone I could very easily inhale by mistake.
Then a glass of champagne appears at my elbow. Eleanor’s best friend Beth, already glowing with what I suspect is not her first round, offers it to me with a wink. This is a woman who understands emergency social intervention when she sees it.
I take it with more gratitude than I can politely show. My shoulders loosen by perhaps half an inch, which is all the relief my body is willing to risk in public.
The first dress arrives on a rolling rack—an architectural column of ivory mikado that commands the room immediately—and the entire group's attention pivots toward it like a compass finding north.
Eleanor follows it into the dressing room with barely suppressed excitement, and I sip my champagne and try to look like someone who belongs here.
Margaret settles beside me and asks, with the polished neutrality of someone who is not neutral in the slightest, whether things between George and me are serious. I open my mouth, discover I have absolutely no usable response prepared for this category of inquiry, and close it again.
Fortunately, Eleanor steps out of the dressing room at exactly that moment, and the room answers with one collective intake of breath that rescues me completely. The dress is beautiful, all clean lines and sculptural confidence, but Eleanor is already frowning at the mirror.
"The bodice is doing something strange when I move," she says, twisting at the waist.
I tilt my head and look, and the problem is immediately obvious—the boning sitting a half-inch too high for her ribcage, pulling the whole structure out of alignment when she shifts.
Don't say anything, Tessa. You are a fake girlfriend at a dress appointment, not a seamstress.
"Could you try raising your arms?" I say, because apparently I have the self-discipline of a puppy.
Eleanor raises them. The fabric bunches exactly where I predicted.
“The boning isn’t sitting correctly,” I say before I can stop myself. “It’s too high for her frame, so the whole bodice shifts when she moves.”
Margaret’s head turns toward me with the sharp, recalculating focus of a woman updating my file in real time.
A moment later the consultant materializes at my shoulder, agrees in a tone that suggests she would have preferred to arrive at that conclusion herself, and disappears to hunt down a different sample.
"How did you even see that?" Beth whispers.
I take a long sip of champagne instead of answering, because the honest answer is three years of dressing women to meet billionaire expectations will attune you to structural failure very quickly.
While Eleanor is back in the dressing room, Beth asks about my work as a matchmaker.
I give her the polished version, the one with chemistry and intuition and helping people find the right fit. I do not tell her that most days involve contracts, scheduling, legal phrasing, and administrative follow-through.
Relationships, as it turns out, are often held together by paperwork and strategic calendar management.
Then Eleanor reappears.
The second dress is different in every way, softer where the first was structured, French lace falling in long unhurried lines that seem to quiet the entire room on contact. The silence that follows has a different quality to it, less analytical, more held-breath reverent.
I feel an unexpected prickling at the corners of my eyes, which is alarming and frankly inconvenient, and I blink it away quickly.
Eleanor turns to face the mirror and goes completely still.
"Oh," she says, quietly.
Beth reaches over and squeezes my arm without looking at me, an easy, unthinking gesture of shared feeling, and the simple familiarity of it startles me more than it should.
I am not part of this family. I have known these women for less than two hours. And yet something in my chest is behaving as though I am one of them.
Eleanor finds me in a quiet corner while the consultant is on her knees pinning the hem, pulling me close with the conspiratorial air.
Her voice drops. "I keep having this dream where I get to the aisle and nothing feels the way I thought it would," she admits, and her smile falters just slightly at the edges, showing the real worry underneath.
I set my champagne down. This moment doesn't deserve a prop in my hand.
“I think that’s your brain reminding you that the important part is the person waiting at the end,” I say, “not whether every second before that unfolds exactly the way you pictured it.” I mean it completely, which surprises me a little.
Eleanor studies me for a long moment with an expression I cannot immediately read. "George said you were straightforward," she says. “I didn’t realize until right now that he meant it as a compliment.”
I tuck that comment away before I can turn it over too much and make a mess of it in my own head.
Beth reappears at precisely the right time, announcing bridesmaid dress discussions with the energy of someone deploying a rescue flare, and I suddenly find a swatch book thrust in my hand.
The women seem torn between two colors for bridesmaid dresses.
"Be honest. Dusty rose or sage?"
"Sage," I say, without a moment's hesitation, because dusty rose is unforgiving and Beth has warm undertones and I have strong opinions about colour theory that I am constitutionally incapable of suppressing.
Beth points at me. "I like her."
Margaret settles into the chair beside me, and I know before she opens her mouth that we are now in the more serious portion of the afternoon.
She asks how George and I first got together, watching my face with those precise grey eyes, and I give her the gallery story (George’s version, polished and plausible) but then add the part I invented on the spot, the part I’ve somehow come to believe a little myself: how we ran into each other at a gallery opening and spent twenty minutes arguing about a painting before he finally asked me to dinner.
Margaret's mouth curves at the corners. "That sounds exactly like him."
The warmth in her voice when she says him does something unexpected to my ribcage. Something I was not prepared for and cannot immediately categorise.
"He told me you were good at your job," she adds, studying her glass rather than me, which somehow makes it worse.
I am extremely grateful, in this moment, that champagne glasses exist to give your hands and your mouth something to do when you need a few seconds to collect yourself.
Eleanor floats back to the mirror in the lace dress one final time, and someone turns the soft boutique music up just slightly and the afternoon light filtering through the silk wall panels turns the whole room amber and gold.
She turns slowly, looking at herself with an expression of quiet recognition, as if she’s finally meeting someone she’s been waiting for.
Then the room sighs. Eleanor laughs, bright and relieved. Margaret presses a hand to her mouth. Beth already has her phone out.
Eleanor spins toward us with her arms wide and asks her mother first, then Beth, and then me, her eyes landing on me with a directness that catches me off guard. “Tessa. Yes?”
"Absolutely yes," I say, and the smile I give her is entirely real.
That should probably concern me more than it does.
Standing here in the amber light with champagne in my hand and lace catching the afternoon sun, I can no longer tell whether this whole situation feels like a triumph or the beginning of a problem.
I pull out my phone under the pretence of checking the time and discover my fingers already moving across the screen before I have consciously decided to text him at all.
Your sister is genuinely lovely and I was deeply unprepared for that.
I stare at the sentence, at how honest it is, at how little it sounds like something a temporary girlfriend should send.
Then I delete it letter by careful letter until the screen is blank again.
I look at the empty message box for a moment, thumb hovering.
Finally, I type: The dress appointment went well.
Send.