Prologue #2
Two hundred dollars in twenties one week, three hundred the next, cash back from errands my mother sent me on or skimmed from the allowance my father still gave me for lunches I never ate.
A pair of jeans bought at a discount store in a town twenty minutes north of my parents’ house, paid for in cash, tags removed in the parking lot.
A long-sleeved T-shirt. Underwear. A pair of canvas sneakers, size seven, never worn.
A toothbrush. Travel-size deodorant. A hairbrush.
A folded paper map of Tennessee from a rest stop because I didn’t trust the GPS on the phone they had given me at sixteen.
And the burner.
I’d bought it at a gas station forty minutes from my parents’ house on a Tuesday afternoon in October, after telling my mother I was going to my Pilates class.
I’d paid cash. The clerk had not looked at me.
I hadn’t turned it on yet. It sat in the bottom of the bag, still in its plastic shell, the charger coiled beside it.
I took it out of the shell. My fingers shook on the plastic and I waited until they stopped, then peeled the rest of it back and held the phone in my palm.
It was very small. Black. Cheap. I tucked it down inside the bodice of the gown where the beading was densest, where Grant’s grandmother’s emerald brooch was pinned at the waist, and the boning of the dress held it tight against my ribs.
I looped the tote over one shoulder.
I bent down -- slowly, because the gown didn’t want me to -- and unbuckled the satin strap of one ivory heel, then the other.
I stepped out of them and left them lying on their sides in the middle of the bridal suite like two guests who had overstayed their welcome.
Digging through my bag, I pulled out the pair of sneakers and slipped them on.
Downstairs, the quartet had stopped playing. Someone -- the coordinator, probably, or one of her assistants -- was making an announcement to the seated guests in the warm, modulated tone of a person preparing two hundred people to stand at the appearance of a bride.
I went to the door, put my hand on it, and listened.
I went down the back stairs, the canvas tote bumping against my hip with every step, the gown gathered in one fist so I wouldn’t trip on the hem. The carpet on the upper landing gave way to industrial vinyl halfway down. My shoes squeaked a little every few steps.
At the bottom of the stairs I pushed through the swinging door and the noise of the kitchen hit me -- the hiss of a flat-top, two voices in Spanish arguing pleasantly about the placement of a tray, a third voice calling for hands on hot.
A girl in a white catering jacket pushed past me carrying a sheet pan of tartlets and didn’t look up.
None of them did. A bride in a wedding dress moving through a service kitchen wasn’t the strangest thing they had seen that week, and even if it had been, they had two hundred people to feed.
I kept my head down and my pace steady. The kitchen was long. The exit at the end of it was a steel door with a red bar across it and an EMERGENCY EXIT sign above. I’d stood beneath that sign three weeks ago and timed my walk back. Forty-two seconds.
I made it in thirty-six.
I hit the bar with my hip -- both hands occupied, one with the tote and one with the gown -- and the door swung outward into the dark.
The air hit me first.
It was November in Tennessee, and the day had been warm, but the night was not.
The cold came up off the asphalt of the loading dock and slid under the gown, along my lace-covered arms, and across the back of my neck where the veil still lay.
The veil. I’d forgotten the veil. It was still on, the cathedral length of it draped down my back and trailing two feet behind me on the concrete of the dock, and for one absurd second, I considered going back.
With a mental shrug, I kept going. Went down the three concrete steps off the side of the dock.
The gravel crunched with each step, and I picked up my pace.
The access road ran east. To my right was a row of valet town cars parked along the front of the building -- I could see the chrome and the gleam of them through the gap between the building and the catering tent -- and a knot of drivers in black suits standing near the valet stand, smoking, their faces lit blue by their phones.
None of them looked up. The catering tent ran a long fluorescent line of light along its seam, and I could hear voices inside it, the rattle of glassware, the wet sound of ice being shoveled.
I kept the building between me and the valet stand and I moved.
The gown didn’t want me to move. The silk skirt spread wider than I was used to.
The beading dragged at my shoulders. The train caught against my calves and scraped over gravel, picking up grit and dirt and whatever else.
I gathered more of it in my fist and lifted the hem to my knees.
I walked, then jogged, and then -- when the row of town cars was behind me and the building had narrowed to a single lit window high up on the second floor -- I ran.
I ran east along the gravel road, and the music from the reception came after me through the back wall of the ballroom -- muffled, distorted, the band swinging into something bright and brassy that I recognized from the playlist Grant’s mother had insisted on.
I’d sat at her kitchen island in Connecticut six months ago and listened to her play it through her phone and nodded when she asked if it was perfect.
I’d agreed to all of it, piece by piece.
The music thinned behind me. The gravel changed under my feet -- looser here, then a stretch of grass that was almost soft, then gravel again, then the harder pack of the shoulder where the access road met the two-lane.
I stopped at the edge of it.
I looked left. I looked right.
The road disappeared into black pine country. The Westin sat back from the road behind a long line of poplars, and from where I stood you couldn’t see the building, only the diffuse glow of it above the trees, like a stadium lit up at a distance.
I didn’t look back.
I stepped onto the asphalt and turned north. North led to the highway, and highways had buses, and buses went to places that weren’t here. I started running again.
The bag knocked against my hip. The burner pressed against my ribs through the beading. The gown dragged at my legs and the cold found every gap the neckline left. Far behind me, barely audible, a woman who might have been my mother might have been calling my name.
I ran.