Chapter 4 #2
She doesn’t know that I know her. The realization makes the uneasiness feel thicker. Somehow, she’s convinced herself that feathers and candlelight have made her anonymous.
The urge to flee from her like a girl in one of the horror movies Reed and I watch late at night is so violent I nearly stumble backward.
“I’m fine,” I manage. My accent is thicker, vowels longer, with East Tennessee slipping in before I can catch it.
“You look pale.” She steps closer. “These evenings can be difficult.”
“I need air.”
“Yes.” Her voice gentles. “I imagine you do.”
Something in her voice makes my skin prickle. I try to step around her, but she shifts with me, not touching, just blocking the hall with all that polite concern.
“I know the last few years have been hard on you and Reed.”
My fingers curl into my skirt. At first, I think she means the house. Or maybe she means how I’ve polished down the parts of me that don’t fit into rooms with polite, expensive society women. Women like her.
“We’re fine,” I say.
“Oh, Annie.” My name, in that voice. My stomach turns.
“No one expects you to pretend with me,” she says. “Not after everything. The treatments alone would exhaust any woman.”
The corridor goes silent. The music is still there somewhere, but the room seems to stretch, like some overused effect in a flashy movie. Catherine reaches up and adjusts one pearl earring beneath her mask. “And the losses. I know the most recent one was particularly cruel.”
My mouth opens. Nothing comes out.
She knows.
Catherine sighs, almost tender. “Reed has always wanted a family. You know that better than anyone. He tries not to let you see how deeply this disappoints him, but a mother knows her son.”
The wall behind her seems to tilt.
“No,” I whisper. Whether I mean no, she doesn’t know, or no, stop speaking, or no, Reed would never, I can’t tell.
Her covered eyes soften. “Sometimes loving someone means recognizing when you can’t give them the life they were meant to have.”
The citrus scent from the distant trees turns sour in my throat.
I think of our bathroom at dawn. Reed’s hand shaking around the pregnancy test. Eleven days of careful happiness.
The nurse’s voice. The bedspread beneath my palms after.
Reed sitting on the floor in front of me because I couldn’t stand the thought of being held and, at the same time, couldn’t bear not being held.
That belonged to us.
“I don’t know what you think you know,” I say, but the words come out pure Smoky Mountain twang. The performance is gone. Catherine registers the slip instantly, that small, polished satisfaction straightening her spine.
“I know enough to care,” she says. “For both of you.”
“Move.”
She doesn’t. “Lexi has always adored him,” she continues, soft and steady. “She understands this family. This life. She wants children very much, and she would never make Reed feel guilty for wanting the same.”
My hand flies to my stomach before I can stop it. Catherine’s gaze drops there.
My body gets it before my mind does. Reed told someone.
He must have. I told no one. Not Catherine, not the women at fittings, not the committees, cousins, or any doctor outside the exam rooms. Aunt Lanie knows bits and pieces, enough to hear my voice and fill in the pain around the edges, but not even she knows about all of this.
Not the IVF rounds. Not every loss, one after another.
Not the last one three months ago, still raw enough that I sometimes wake up with my palm flat over nothing.
Only Reed knows the whole truth. Reed, who whispered, “You and me, kid.” Reed, whose mouth was on Lexi’s mouth five minutes ago because she put on my dress and waited for him.
“There comes a point,” Catherine says, “when holding on stops being love.”
I look back toward the corridor, toward the orangery, toward the place where another woman stood dressed like me and convinced my husband to touch her.
The fitting room flashes bright and sickening behind my eyes: Lexi’s gaze moving over my gown, my hair, the raven mask in Mrs. Davenport’s hand.
Her smile when she said it was perfect for me.
Perfect.
My chest tightens. Who knows? The women who asked about a grandbaby? Margaret with her soft laugh? Patricia saying this house needed children? Catherine on the phone, saying, “She’s been through enough.” Tara. Glen. Lexi.
Maybe all of them know. Maybe they’ve been looking at me for months, my private grief serving as fodder for gossip and whispers at luncheons.
Catherine touches my arm. The contact snaps something. I tear away from her and rip the mask from my face. One ribbon catches in my hair, yanking hard enough to sting, and the feathers bend under my fist.
“Don’t touch me.”
This time my voice carries. A couple at the end of the corridor turns. Someone pauses beside a marble-topped table. The house sharpens around me in terrible detail: candle flames, gilt frames, black gloves, champagne bubbles, Catherine’s pearls.
“Annie,” Catherine says, lower now.
I shove past her. My skirt tangles around my legs, so I grab it up in one hand and walk faster. Right now, I’m not even sure where I’m going. Just away. My lungs feel as if they’re shutting down in protest. Every breath feels like it stops halfway.
I hear myself wheeze, the sound unfamiliar and terrifying.
Faces blur. Masks turn. A woman says my name.
I keep moving. The ballroom opens up ahead, too bright and loud, every chandelier blazing over people who might know.
How many people are looking at me right now, seeing my grief laid over my face like a sheet of tracing paper?
How many are saying, “There goes Annie. Selfish Annie who’s put Reed through so much with her inability to do the one thing she should be able to do for him. ”
I crush the raven mask to my chest. Reed told. Reed told. Catherine knows, and Lexi knows exactly how to dress like me.
Someone calls for Reed.
The floor tilts under me. I try to catch myself and miss. My knees hit first, pain shooting up my legs. Then the cold marble comes up fast, and my dark-red skirt folds around me like spilled wine.
The last thing I hear is Reed shouting my name. Then even that disappears.