Chapter 2
NOELLE
She woke in the blue hour, before the alarm, before the house, before anything had decided yet what kind of day this would be.
For a few seconds Noelle lay very still under the coverlet she'd slept under since she was twelve.
The ceiling above her was the same ceiling, the molding at the corners was the same molding she'd traced with her eyes through every fever, every boyfriend, every argument at the dinner table she hadn't been allowed to leave.
Somewhere downstairs, a pipe ticked. The house did what it always did in the early morning, which was nothing.
Today, she'd marry Elias Strathmore.
Noelle sat up and pressed the heel of her hand flat against her breastbone and held it there, as though she could press something back into place that had already shifted.
On the dresser across the room, her mother's pearls lay coiled in a small porcelain dish where she'd left them the night before.
Beside them, a silver-framed photograph: her mother at twenty-two, in a wedding dress that had belonged to her mother, standing on the steps of Holy Name Cathedral with both hands folded over a bouquet of white peonies.
The photograph had stood on that dresser since Noelle was a child.
She'd looked at it a thousand times and never really looked at it.
Now she looked. Her mother in that photograph was smiling with her whole face, the smile of a young woman who hadn't yet learned how much of her life would be spent arranging her face for other people.
Noelle looked away.
A knock at the door. Soft, familiar. Her mother didn't wait for an answer; she never had.
"You're awake."
Her mother closed the door behind her, already dressed, already set: the dove-gray dress she'd chosen weeks ago after making Noelle try on four of her own, as though the color of the mother-of-the-bride could somehow balance the books on the whole arrangement.
Her hair was pinned. Her lipstick was on.
She'd always been this way. Noelle couldn't remember a morning in her life when her mother had come to her unfinished.
"The car's in an hour," her mother said. She crossed the room without approaching the bed and adjusted the curtain by an inch that didn't need adjusting. "Heather's here at eight to start your hair. Don't drink coffee. It'll make your hands unsteady."
"I know."
"And don't pick at the cuticle on your ring finger. You've been doing it."
"You won't be alone today," her mother said. "We'll be with you the whole way."
"I know."
"It'll be beautiful. Everyone's said so."
"I know."
Her mother lingered another moment at the window, then crossed back to the door. Her hand was already on the knob when she stopped.
"Noelle."
"Yes."
A beat. Her mother didn't turn around.
"It doesn't always stay this hard."
And then she was gone, the door clicking behind her.
Noelle sat in the bed for a long time.
She didn't cry. She'd, somewhere around the age of nineteen, lost the ability to cry about anything that mattered; she could still cry at films. She could cry when a stranger was kind to her on the street.
But anything that touched the core of her life moved through her now in a different way.
A stillness, a held breath, a tightening of the jaw her mother had trained into her the way another mother might train a daughter to play piano.
She got up.
She crossed to the dresser and picked up the pearls.
They were cool in her palm. She looked at the photograph of her mother at twenty-two, and then she looked at her own reflection in the mirror above the dresser.
For a long moment she could see how the face in the photograph had become the face of the woman who'd just left the room.
The softness gone somewhere. The smile learning, over the years, to live only in the lower half of the face.
Her own face looked back at her.
Red hair pinned loose at the nape. Brown eyes — her grandmother's eyes, her mother had told her when she was eight, warm as tea, large enough to give her away if she wasn't careful.
A mouth she'd never been entirely certain how to arrange; it went soft when she wasn't watching it.
Her skin was paler than it should have been because she hadn't slept, and the paleness made the red of her hair read brighter against the white of her nightgown.
She looked the way people had been telling her she looked all her life.
Lovely. Composed. Unfinished, as though the bridegroom were meant to complete her.
It doesn't always stay this hard.
Noelle clasped the pearls around her throat and went to get dressed.
The venue was a private room at the Peninsula, set above the lake, which her father had chosen because it was smaller than the ballroom and therefore read, to the right people, as restraint.
White peonies down the aisle. Her mother had made sure of the peonies.
The candles were already lit when Noelle arrived, though it was barely afternoon, and the effect was the effect her mother had wanted, a room that felt like it had been waiting a long time for them.
She didn't look at the guests as she stepped into the vestibule.
She'd done the receiving already, in the downstairs salon, where she'd smiled at the same forty faces she'd been smiling at her whole life, accepted their kisses on her cheeks, the small cool pressure of their rings against her jaw.
She'd said thank you until the word stopped meaning anything.
Now those forty faces were seated in rows, behind them were another hundred and sixty she didn't know, and somewhere at the end of the aisle was the man she'd spoken to once, and who had, at the end of those eleven minutes, closed behind his eyes in a way she'd tried to explain to herself.
She hadn't succeeded.
Her father offered his arm. She took it.
He didn't look at her. That was the thing.
He hadn't looked at her since the morning in his study six months ago, not really.
He'd looked in her direction. He'd spoken to a point over her left shoulder.
But he hadn't met her eyes, and he didn't meet them now.
Noelle understood that her father had decided he couldn't afford to.
"You look lovely," he said, to the carpet.
"Thank you."
"Your mother cried. When she came out to the car."
"I didn't know."
"She wouldn't want you to."
They stood in the vestibule with their arms linked.
He didn't say anything else, and somewhere on the other side of the doors the music began.
Her father's hand came up and adjusted his tie, and Noelle thought: He's going to walk me down an aisle, hand me to a stranger and he'll do it without ever once, in the whole ceremony, meeting my eyes.
The aisle wasn't long. She'd expected it to feel long. It was the shortest walk of her life.
Faces turned. Attention tracked. Somewhere a woman sighed the appreciative sigh women sighed at weddings, and somewhere else a program fluttered, and Noelle was aware of all of it at the periphery of her vision and none of it at the center. The center was at the end of the aisle.
Elias stood there.
He'd dressed the way he'd dressed the night of the engagement party, the same dark suit, the same knot at his throat. His hair was the same. His posture was the same. His face was the same handsome visage.
But in the afternoon light coming in from the lake-facing windows, she saw him in a way she hadn't seen him at night.
The candles at the altar threw warmth up into his face, found the gold in the hazel of his eyes, the faint shadow of a beard he must have shaved that morning and forgotten about by now.
His mouth, which had looked hard across a crowded room looked, in this light, like the mouth of a man who knew how to be tender and had decided against it.
He was, she realized with a dry small jolt, more handsome than she'd let herself admit.
Handsome in a way that was not going to make anything about this easier.
His eyes when they found her in the doorway and tracked her down the length of the aisle did something she hadn't expected.
They didn't soften. She wouldn't have been able to live with it if they'd softened.
What they did was narrow, as though something about the sight of her in white had caught him off guard.
Whatever he'd seen was put away somewhere, and the face that finished watching her walk was the face he'd walked away from her with nights ago.
The attentive courtesy. The door gently closed.
She stopped in front of him. Her father placed her hand in his.
There, she thought, and the thought surprised her with its ugliness. There it is. The reach across the table. Only it isn't his hand. It's someone else's.
Her father stepped back. He didn't look at her. He didn't look at Elias. He returned to his seat.
Elias's hand closed around hers.
It was the first thing about him that had ever surprised her.
His grip was warm. She'd prepared herself for something cool and contained, something to match the rest of him, and instead his palm against hers was warm the way a living thing is warm.
Blood moving under skin, the heat of a body that had walked through the morning, stood at an altar and was now holding her hand because that was what the ceremony required of him.
He didn't let go when the officiant began to speak.
She'd assumed he would. A polite clasp, a release. That was what the rehearsal had been. But his fingers stayed closed around hers, and the pad of his thumb rested once, lightly, against the thin skin of her wrist.
She kept her face still. She'd been practicing.