Chương 5
Daniel leaned against the elevator wall.
“For what it’s worth, she spent six months pretending she didn’t want a dog before bringing home a rescue mutt while I was on a business trip.”
Emily looked at him.
“He chewed my passport.”
“That’s not really the same thing.”
“No.”
The elevator opened.
Daniel stepped aside.
“I know.”
Emily walked toward employee health, then turned.
“Daniel?”
“Yeah?”
“Laura talked about her.”
He waited.
“A lot.”
Daniel nodded.
“I think Claire will want to know that.”
Back upstairs, Claire had changed.
Not out of her wedding dress. She was not ready to do that.
But she had removed the veil and exchanged the jeweled shoes her stylist had insisted upon for white sneakers hidden beneath the gown.
Her maid of honor, Natalie, stood behind her fixing the loose bun.
Neither spoke about what had happened.
Natalie removed three pins, replaced two, then finally said, “Do you want me to tell everybody to go home?”
Claire studied herself in the mirror.
“No.”
“Do you want me to tell Margaret to go home?”
Claire looked at Natalie through the glass.
“That’s tempting.”
“I can do it.”
“You’re five foot three.”
“I have rage.”
Claire laughed.
This one lasted longer.
Natalie smiled, then immediately cried.
“Oh, no.”
“Don’t.”
“I’m sorry.”
“If you cry, I’m going to cry.”
“I’m not crying.”
“You absolutely are.”
Natalie wiped under her eyes with both middle fingers.
“I had waterproof mascara. This is insulting.”
Claire looked at herself again.
For years, Laura had complained that Claire smiled with only the left side of her mouth when she was tired.
She could see it now.
She wondered whether Emily did anything else like her.
The thought produced both longing and suspicion.
She hated that those feelings could exist together so easily.
Daniel returned.
Natalie kissed Claire’s shoulder and left them alone.
He sat on the vanity stool.
“What do you want to do?”
Claire picked up the watch.
The broken chain remained beside it.
“I don’t know.”
“We can end the reception.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Okay.”
“I also don’t want to go back in there.”
“Okay.”
“You’re being irritating.”
“What answer would be less irritating?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then I’m doing excellent husband work.”
She looked at him.
“You’ve been married forty-eight minutes.”
“I’m pacing myself.”
Claire sat on the sofa.
Daniel took her hand.
This time she let him.
“My mother hid a daughter from me.”
“Maybe.”
Claire looked at him sharply.
He did not back away from the word.
“You don’t know yet.”
“The watch.”
“I believe Emily. I also think you deserve to verify whatever can be verified before you let one night rewrite twenty-eight years of your life.”
Claire stared at him.
“That sounded like something Margaret would say.”
“I know.”
Daniel rubbed his thumb across her knuckles.
“That’s why I hated saying it.”
She looked down.
After a moment she said, “Thank you.”
“For sounding like my mother?”
“For not telling me what I want to hear.”
They returned to the ballroom fourteen minutes later.
Conversation dipped, then tried to recover.
Claire noticed it without acknowledging it.
The DJ announced them with less enthusiasm than before. Daniel put one hand at her waist.
“We can skip this.”
“No.”
“Claire.”
“If I skip it, everyone will keep waiting for something worse to happen.”
“That is a terrible reason to dance.”
“It’s the reason I have.”
He held her a little closer.
The song began.
Neither of them remembered the choreography they had paid a dance instructor seven hundred dollars to teach them.
They swayed.
At one point Claire stepped on Daniel’s shoe.
He whispered, “There’s the woman I married.”
She pressed her forehead briefly to his chest.
Over his shoulder, she saw Margaret standing near the back wall.
For once, Margaret was not talking.
Her champagne-gold gown caught the chandelier light, but her face looked gray.
Claire did not feel triumph.
She wished she did.
After the dance, Daniel’s father quietly took Margaret home.
No speech was made.
No one announced why.
Dinner resumed.
Guests whispered anyway.
By eleven thirty, nearly half the ballroom knew a version of the truth.
By midnight, the internet knew six.
Claire did not check her phone until she and Daniel were alone in their hotel suite.
There were 186 unread messages.
The first video had 420,000 views.
In it, Margaret appeared to strike Emily.
She had not struck her.
The angle concealed the chain.
Another clip, filmed from the opposite side, showed the snap clearly but ended before Claire picked up the watch.
A third captured Claire saying, No… that watch was buried with my mother.
The caption read:
MILLIONAIRE GROOM’S MOM ATTACKS WAITRESS—THEN BRIDE RECOGNIZES DEAD MOM’S WATCH.
Claire threw her phone onto the bed.
Daniel had removed his tuxedo jacket.
“What?”
“We’re content.”
He looked at her phone.
“Oh.”
“People are making reaction videos.”
“Don’t watch them.”
“One woman has already diagnosed your mother with a personality disorder.”
“That took longer than expected.”
Claire laughed despite herself.
Then she sat on the edge of the bed and began to cry.
Not dramatically.
Nothing about it relieved her.
Tears simply came while she stared at her white sneakers sticking out beneath several thousand dollars of lace.
Daniel sat beside her.
He did not tell her it would be okay.
After a while, Claire said, “I was mad at her.”
“Emily?”
“My mother.”
Daniel waited.
“The last week she was alive.”
Claire wiped her face.
“She kept asking me to bring her this blue sweater from her apartment. I brought the wrong one twice. She got irritated, and I told her she could have labeled her clothes if it mattered that much.”
Daniel put an arm around her.
Claire leaned against him.
“She died the next morning.”
“That isn’t why she died.”
“I know.”
The words came out sharper than she intended.
Daniel nodded.
“I know you know.”
May you like
Claire closed her eyes.
“I spent fourteen months wishing my last normal conversation with her had been nicer. And now I find out she had this whole… whole person.”
