17. Charlotte
— ? —
Charlotte
There was a box on my porch when I opened the door.
It was white and heavy, tied with a black ribbon that felt expensive beneath my fingers, and when I carried it inside and set it on the kitchen table I already knew who it was from before I lifted the lid.
The dress inside was green, dark like the ocean at night, silk that caught the light and held it. Beneath it was a card in handwriting I would have recognized anywhere.
The auction is Saturday. Come with me. As mine.
My phone buzzed before I could decide what to do with any of it.
“Please tell me you’re not standing in your kitchen talking yourself out of something good,” Kiera said when I answered.
“How do you know I’m in my kitchen?”
“Because that’s where you go when you’re overthinking, and a courier just delivered something to your house from a very expensive shop in town, and I’m guessing the contents of that box are making you spiral.”
“How do you even know all this?”
“Oh, Randy was at the store to drop something off for the guest. And he overheard them talking about your delivery. So are you spiraling already?”
“I’m not spiraling,” I said. “I’m considering my options.”
“Your options are you go to the auction with the man who clearly wants to be seen with you in public, or you send the dress back and spend Saturday night alone eating cereal and pretending you made the right choice.”
“Those aren’t the only options,” I said. “I could go to the auction alone. I could work the auction like I was originally scheduled to. I could…”
“Charlotte, I watched you in that breakroom. I saw the way you looked at him. Whatever is happening between you two, it’s not casual and it’s not going away just because you refuse to name it.”
“If I go to that auction on his arm, everyone sees us together.” I sat down at the kitchen table and stared at the dress pooled in its box like something alive. “Madison sees us. Sean sees us. Everyone I work with sees me as the receptionist who’s sleeping with a guest.”
“So what?”
“So my job is all I have here,” I said. “My job and this house and a life I built from nothing after I ran away from everything else. If that falls apart because I couldn’t keep my distance from a man I already know how to lose, then what was any of it for?”
“It was for surviving,” Kiera said. “And you survived. But surviving isn’t the same as living, and at some point you have to decide which one you’re actually doing.”
The line was quiet for a moment.
“He’s asking you to be seen with him,” Kiera said. “When’s the last time anyone asked you for that?”
I didn’t have an answer.
“Go to the auction, Charlotte. Wear the dress. Let yourself have one night where you’re not the receptionist or the runaway bride or the woman who’s too scared to want things. Just be the woman in the green dress who showed up because someone asked her to.”
I hung up the phone and looked at the dress for a long time.
Then I carried it upstairs and hung it in my closet next to the clothes I’d brought from Chicago, the ones I never wore anymore, the ones that belonged to a different version of me.
Saturday came faster than I expected.
I got ready in the bathroom with the cracked mirror, the light wrong and the angle worse, but I could see enough to know that the woman looking back at me wasn’t the one who stood behind the desk at The Cove with a name tag pinned to her chest.
The dress fit like it had been made for me. The silk clung to my waist and fell in a column to the floor, and when I turned to check the back I caught a glimpse of bare skin above the low dip of the fabric.
The ballroom was transformed when I arrived, full of people in evening wear and candlelight and the kind of money that didn’t need to announce itself.
I stood in the doorway and scanned the room and found him almost immediately, across the floor in a suit that fit him like it was painted on, talking to Spencer about something that made them both laugh.
Then he looked up and saw me.
The laughter died on his face, and he was crossing the room before I could decide whether to meet him halfway or stay where I was.
“You came,” he said when he reached me, his hand finding the small of my back like it belonged there.
“The dress didn’t give me much choice,” I said. “It’s hard to say no to silk.”
“I was hoping the card would do some of the work too,” he said. “But I’ll take silk as an accomplice.”
“The card was presumptuous,” I said. “As mine. Like I’m something that can be claimed.”
“You’re something that can be asked,” he said. “And I’m asking. Presumptuously, apparently, but I’ve never been good at subtle.”
“No,” I said. “Subtle is definitely not your strength.”
“You look incredible, by the way,” he said, and his eyes moved down my body in a way that made my skin warm. “I was trying to wait at least thirty seconds before I said it so I didn’t seem desperate, but I failed.”
“You made it almost twenty,” I said. “That’s something.”
“I had a whole plan,” he said. “I was going to be cool and detached, make you work for compliments, play hard to get. Then you walked in wearing that dress and the plan fell apart completely.”
He couldn’t take his eyes off me.
“Fuck, Char. You are trouble,” he said. “But you’re also the most beautiful woman in this room and I’m not going to pretend I don’t notice just because it makes me sound like every other man who’s ever told you that.”
“Most of them said perfect,” I said. “You’re the first one who said trouble.”
“Perfect is boring,” he said. “Perfect is what people say when they want you to fit into a box they’ve already built. Trouble is what people say when they know you’re going to break the box and they can’t wait to watch it happen.”
His hand pressed firmer against my back, guiding me into the room, and I let him.
We moved through the crowd together, stopping to greet people I didn’t know and a few I did.
Spencer raised his glass to me from across the room with a knowing smirk.
“You’re handling this well,” Sutton said as we drifted toward the bar. “The staring. The whispers. Half the room is trying to figure out who you are.”
“I’m used to being looked at,” I said. “I just usually have a name tag that answers their questions.”
“Tonight the only answer they get is mine,” he said. “And I’m not sharing.”
“Possessive,” I said.
“Extremely,” he said. “Also proud. And a little smug, if I’m honest. Do you know how many men in this room are looking at you and then looking at me and wondering how I managed it?”
“Managed what?”
“Getting you to show up,” he said. “Getting you to stand next to me like you actually want to be here.”
“I haven’t decided if I want to be here yet,” I said. “I’m still evaluating.”
“What’s the verdict so far?”
“The champagne is good,” I said. “The company is acceptable. The man who invited me keeps saying things that make me want to either kiss him or push him into the harbor, and I haven’t figured out which yet.”
“I’m fine with either,” he said. “As long as you stay close enough to do it.”
A woman appeared at my elbow before I could respond, silver-haired and elegant.
“Charlotte,” she said. “I was hoping to find a moment with you.”
Sutton’s hand tensed against my back. “Mother.”
“You can borrow her back in a few minutes,” Laura said to him. She said it pleasantly, but it wasn’t a request. Sutton looked at me, checking, and I nodded slightly.
“I’ll be right over there,” he said to me. “Signal if you need extraction.”
He walked away, and Laura turned to me with an expression I couldn’t read.
“You look uncomfortable,” she said. “I understand. The last time we spoke, I wasn’t particularly warm to you.”
“That’s one way to put it,” I said.
“I was protective of my son and I expressed it badly,” she said. “I thought you were a complication he didn’t need, and I treated you like an obstacle instead of a person. That was wrong of me.”
“Mrs. Lynch…”
“Laura,” she said. “If we’re going to have this conversation, you should at least use my name.”
“Laura,” I said. “You don’t have to apologize. It was a long time ago, and honestly, you weren’t wrong about any of it. I was a complication. Our marriage was a mess. It didn’t work out.”
“Your marriage didn’t fail because you gave up. It failed because he was too stubborn to fight for it, and I didn’t help matters,” she said. “I could have encouraged him to be better, to try harder, and instead I made it easier for him to let you go. I regret that.”
“Why are you telling me this now?”
“Because I watched what happened to him after,” she said. “And because I don’t want to make the same mistake twice.”
“What happened to him after?” I asked.
“He fell apart,” Laura said simply. “After you divorced him he kept going to work, kept closing deals, kept showing up to family dinners and saying all the right things. But something essential had gone out of him. I watched him not-say your name for months. Watched him change the subject every time someone mentioned marriage or divorce or anything that might lead back to you. He yearned for you like it was a job, like it was the only thing he knew how to do anymore.”
“He never tried to find me,” I said. “After I left. He never came after me.”
“Because he believed you’d married someone else,” Laura said.
“I know my son, and I know he wouldn’t have stayed away if he’d known you were waiting.
Whatever mistakes he made in that marriage, he loved you.
He still loves you. He’s just too proud to say it until he’s sure you won’t use it against him. ”
I didn’t know what to do with any of this. With Laura being kind, with the picture she was painting of Sutton grieving something he thought he’d lost.
“Why should I believe you?” I asked. “Why should I believe any of this isn’t just another manipulation to get me to fall in line with what your family wants?”
“Because I have nothing to gain from lying,” Laura said. “My son is happier than I’ve seen him in years, and the only thing that’s changed is you. I’m too old to play games with people’s hearts, and I’m tired of watching him carry around the weight of losing you when you’re standing right here.”
She touched my arm, just briefly.
“Give him a chance,” she said. “I think you’ll be surprised.”
She walked away before I could respond, disappearing back into the crowd like she’d never been there at all.
I stood alone with my champagne and felt something shifting in my chest, felt the wall I’d been maintaining start to crumble in ways I couldn’t control.
I was halfway to believing him when I heard his voice from across the room, in a way I’d never heard before.
My feet took me toward it before my head caught up.