2. Paige
— ? —
Paige
“Okay, don’t kill me,” Tara says, sweeping into the bridal salon eleven minutes late with two coffees and her sunglasses pushed up into her hair, “but I already looked online and I’ve picked your dress. You’re allowed to try on others as a formality.”
A week since the text.
A week of carbonara and good-morning kisses and lying in the dark next to a man whose phone I now know better than my own heartbeat.
Six days of learning that the second-worst part of being betrayed is how easy it is to hide that you know - people see what they expect.
Cole expects a happy wife. Tara expects a best friend.
I’ve decided to be both. Beautifully. Right up until I’m neither.
“You picked my vow renewal dress,” I say, taking my coffee. Oat milk, one sugar - she’s known my order for fifteen years. I know things about her now too.
“Someone had to. Left to yourself you’d wear the navy thing again.
” She loops her arm through mine, steering me past racks of white toward the consultant, and her perfume washes over me - the same perfume, I understand now, that has been drifting off my husband’s collars on Thursday nights for who knows how long, filed by my trusting nose under she must have hugged him at some point.
“This is a bridal do-over, babe. We’re going full fairy tale. ”
That woman deserves the whole fairy tale.
“Full fairy tale,” I agree. “Every last page of it.”
Watching her charm the consultant, order champagne we didn’t ask for, kick off her shoes and fold herself onto the salon’s velvet couch like she owns it - I keep waiting for it to show.
That’s the thing I could not have imagined from the outside: I keep looking for the seam.
Some tell in her face, some flicker of the woman who texts my husband about leaks that aren’t leaks.
There’s nothing. She sparkles at me exactly the way she sparkled at nineteen.
Whatever machinery runs underneath, it’s been running so long it doesn’t even hum anymore.
Which means every memory I own has her machinery under it too.
The consultant brings the champagne, and Tara stands up on the velvet couch in her socks - actually stands on it, thirty-four years old - and raises her glass to the whole salon.
“To Paige,” she announces, “who married a good one, and is about to do it AGAIN, because some love stories get a sequel.” Scattered applause from strangers. A bride-to-be across the room lifts her glass. Tara looks down at me, glowing, glass high. “Twelve years, babe. To twelve more.”
“To the sequel,” I say, and drink.
“None for me past a sip - bloat is real and that dress is unforgiving.” Tara hands her barely-touched flute to the consultant and hops down. I think nothing of it. There is so much I think nothing of, this spring.
“Okay, gown number one.” She claps twice. “Go. Transform.”
The first dress is wrong and the second is worse and the third is the one she picked, and of course it’s perfect, because Tara has impeccable taste in everything of mine - my clothes, my hair, my husband.
Ivory, off the shoulder, a beaded bodice scattered with tiny crystals and a skirt of soft tulle, a line of tiny buttons down the spine.
The consultant gets me into it and then gets called away, and that’s how it happens that it’s Tara who steps up behind me at the mirror to do the zipper.
“Oh,” she says softly, to my reflection. “Oh, Paige.”
Her fingers find the zipper at the small of my back.
Here’s what I know that she doesn’t know I know, in the long mirror of a bridal salon on a Tuesday: those fingers have undone my life.
Those fingers have texted usual time? and touched my husband’s skin and helped plan the party where he’ll promise me forever, and right now they’re sliding a zipper up my spine with the tenderness of fifteen years, and her chin comes to rest on my bare shoulder, and our eyes meet in the glass.
“You’re going to end him,” she whispers, delighted. “He’s going to see you at that altar and just - die.”
“That’s the plan.”
“God, look at you.” Her arms come around me from behind, careful of the dress, and she squeezes, and I let her, and the mirror holds all of it - the bride, the best friend, the tableau we’ve been posing for since college.
I used to think this reflection was the truest thing in my life.
“Twelve years and he still looks at you like you hung the moon, you know that? You two give me hope.”
The champagne is the only thing keeping my voice level. “Hope for what?”
“That it exists. The real thing.” And there - there, so fast that anyone who wasn’t hunting for it would miss it - her eyes leave mine in the mirror. A flick down. Half a heartbeat. Then back, bright as ever. “That some people actually get to keep it.”
Her phone starts buzzing on the velvet couch.
It’s face up. From where I’m standing on the little platform in my ivory dress, I can see the screen light, and the name on it, and Tara can see me seeing, and the room goes very still under all that white.
MIKE (PLUMBER)
“Ugh, sorry - my landlord’s guy, the faucet saga continues.
” She crosses to it fast, silences it, drops it in her purse, and it’s flawless, it really is.
If I hadn’t stood in my kitchen a week ago reading a photo of that faucet - gleaming, fixed, my hero - I would have believed her without a first thought, let alone a second.
The faucet is fixed, Tara. I’ve seen the after picture.
“He can wait,” she says, waving it off. “Today is about you.”
“Today is definitely about me.” Turning on the platform, letting the skirt flare, giving her the smile she came for. “Zip me down? I’m taking this one.”
Her fingers on my spine again. The buttons, one by one.
“Can I ask you something?” I say to the mirror while she works. “And you can’t laugh.”
“Never. Always. Ask.”
“Do you think eight weeks is enough time for Cole to plan this without losing his mind? He won’t let me help with anything.
He keeps saying ‘you just show up.’” A pause, exactly as long as it needs to be.
“You’d tell me, right? If he was drowning over there.
He tells you things. He’s always told you things. ”
Her fingers stop on the zipper. One second. Two.
“What things?” Light as meringue.
“Oh, you know. Guy stuff he thinks will worry me. When his mom had the cancer scare he told you first, remember? So you could tell him how to tell me.” I laugh, warm, easy, the good wife, the blind wife.
“I used to be jealous of that. Now I just think - thank God she’s there.
Thank God he has somewhere to put the things he can’t put on me. ”
Somewhere to put the things he can’t put on me.
In the mirror I watch it land. She’s good - she’s so good, she’s had fifteen years of training on my face - but a fitting-room mirror is honest in a way people can’t manage, and for one unguarded fraction of a second, my best friend looks like a woman standing at her own graveside.
Then it’s gone.
“He’s fine,” Tara says, and kisses my shoulder, and finishes the zipper. “The man talks entire rooms into things for a living. He can seat a whole wedding. You just worry about walking in this dress without causing a traffic accident.”
“You’ll be there early, right? The morning of? I can’t get into this thing without you.”
“Paige.” She turns me around by the shoulders and looks me full in the face, and her eyes are wet, actually wet, and this is the part I’ll be turning over at three in the morning for the rest of my life - I still can’t tell which part of her is performing.
Maybe none of it. Maybe that’s the horror.
“I have been getting you into and out of dresses since 2009. I will be there before the sun. I will be there before the caterer. Try to keep me away from that altar.”
“I won’t,” I promise. “I want you close enough to see everything.”
We pay for the dress. We get lunch after at the bistro we’ve been going to since it was the other bistro, and she steals fries off my plate the way she has since the dining hall, and she does her impression of her landlord - “‘Ma’am, have you tried not using the faucet’” - and I laugh for real twice, which is its own kind of grief.
Then, over coffee, I do a terrible thing. I go fishing.
“So when is it your turn?”
“My turn at what?”
“This.” Waving my hand at the dress bag propped on its own chair like a fourth guest. “Altars. Fairy tales. You’ve been single for - what, two years? Since Marcus?” I stir my coffee, casual as a landmine. “Is there really nobody? You’d tell me if there was somebody.”
Fifteen years of best friendship means I have seen every face Tara owns.
The party face, the funeral face, the face for exes and the face for landlords.
What crosses her now is one I’ve only started cataloging this week: a door easing shut behind her eyes while everything in front of it keeps smiling.
“There’s nobody worth the paperwork,” she says.
“That’s not a no.”
“Paige.”
“That’s REALLY not a no.” I lean in, delighted, merciless, her best friend to the last inch. “Oh my God, there IS somebody. Look at your face. Who is he? Do I know him?”
“There’s-” A breath. She laughs, and the laugh has a wobble in the middle of it, and she covers by stealing another fry. “Okay. Honestly? There was… a thing. Is a thing. Sort of. It’s complicated, and it’s not going anywhere, and I don’t want to talk about it at your bridal lunch.”
“Complicated how? He’s what-” I count on my fingers, watching her, “-moving away? Emotionally unavailable? Married?”
The fry stops halfway to her mouth.
Only for a second. She’s magnificent, she really is; the fry completes its journey, and she rolls her eyes, and she says, “He’s a Gemini,” and we both laugh, and the moment closes over its own depths like water.
“Well.” I raise my coffee cup to her. “Whoever he is - he has no idea how lucky he is. The whole package, right there across the table, and some idiot’s letting it stay complicated.” I hold her eyes. “He should choose you, Tara. Out loud. In front of everybody. You deserve that as much as I do.”
Her eyes fill so fast it startles both of us.
“Allergies,” she says, dabbing with the napkin, laughing at herself. “God. Weddings. They get in the walls.”
“They really do.”
Then we hug on the sidewalk - long, hard, her chin hooked over my shoulder, fifteen years of muscle memory holding on.
“Love you,” she says into my hair. “Love you like crazy.”
“I know exactly how you love me.”
She pulls back and grins and puts her sunglasses down and walks off toward the parking garage with my dress bag’s twin sister swinging from her hand - she bought herself a dusty blue one, for the second row, so we don’t clash - and I stand on the sidewalk and watch my best friend until she’s out of sight.
Then I take out my phone and open the calendar and look at the little heart Cole drew on the vineyard date eight weeks out.
Seven weeks and change now.
That night, Tara texts me a picture of her blue dress hanging on her closet door: WE ARE GOING TO BE SO BEAUTIFUL ??
Two minutes later, in the den, Cole’s phone buzzes on the arm of the couch.
He picks it up, reads, smiles - small, private, gone in a second, a smile I now have a whole catalog for - and puts the phone face-down on his thigh.
“Anything good?” I ask, from six feet and one universe away.
“Junk,” my husband says. “Nobody.”