Chapter 35: The Morning of the Vows
The lace curtains let in a light that seemed almost holy, soft and golden, falling across the worn floorboards in long, gentle stripes. I stood at the mirror and did not recognize the woman looking back at me. That was not new. What was new was that for the first time, I almost did.
The white silk robe hung loose at my shoulders, catching light with every small movement I made. My hair was half-pinned, half-falling, and Margaret's fingers moved through it with a careful tenderness that made something in my chest ache. Behind me, Dana sat cross-legged on the bed in her burgundy robe, a half-empty mimosa in one hand and a bobby pin in the other, watching me with the slightly tipsy grin of a best friend who had been up since six in the morning making sure every fold of my dress hung right.
"Hold still, sweetheart," Margaret murmured. Her voice was low and warm, the same voice that had told me I could call her Mama, and it still undid me a little every time I heard it. "Just one more."
I watched her in the mirror. The silver hair, the flint-gray eyes that had gone soft and misty in the last hour, the way her lips pressed together when she was concentrating on something small and precious. She had raised four boys. She had never done this before, and she was pouring every ounce of a mother's love into the careful spiral of honey-blonde hair she was building at the back of my head.
"There," she said. Then her eyes met mine in the glass, and her voice dropped to a whisper. "You look just like a bride should."
Something caught in my throat. I blinked hard and looked down at my hands, at the ring on my finger, at the way the morning light made the silver locket at my throat gleam. Six months ago I had been a man in a motel room, staring at a body that did not belong to him, wondering if I would survive the night. Now I was standing in a farmhouse bedroom with my mother-in-law-to-be doing my hair while my best friend sipped champagne and told me dirty jokes about wedding nights.
The incongruity of it still hit me sideways. It always would, I thought. Some part of me would always be watching from behind my own eyes, cataloguing, analyzing, waiting for the floor to fall out.
But the woman in the mirror did not look like someone waiting for the floor to fall. She looked like a girl who was loved.
"Okay, that one's a toast," Dana announced, holding up her glass. "Mama Peggy, you've known Allan his whole life. Tell Sabrina one embarrassing thing about him as a child, or no mimosa for you."
Margaret laughed, the sound bright and easy. "He used to follow the chickens around the yard naming them after the deputies his father worked with. There was a hen named Sergeant Bilko who he insisted was the best chicken in the whole county."
I laughed, and the sound came out like a girl's laugh, light and sweet, and I let it. Six months ago I would have hated that sound. Now it felt like a gift.
"Your turn, Dana," Margaret said, picking up her own glass from the vanity. "One embarrassing thing about Allan, or one sweet thing about Sabrina. Your choice."
Dana pretended to think about it, tapping her chin with one finger. "Okay, embarrassing Allan thing. Last week he came into dispatch with grease on his forehead, and I told him about it, and he wiped it off with the back of his hand and smeared it worse. He looked like a coal miner. Took me twenty minutes to stop laughing long enough to tell him to go wash his face."
"He was working on the truck," I said. "We were adjusting the timing. It was a good day."
"A good day that left you with grease on your cheek too," Dana said, grinning. "You didn't even notice until I pointed it out. You two are hopeless."
Margaret handed me a glass and lifted hers. "To my daughter," she said, and her voice cracked just slightly. "Who loves my son. Who taught him how to laugh again."
My eyes burned. I pressed the glass to my lips, tasting the sharp sweetness of champagne and orange juice, and let the burn wash over me.
"To us," Dana said, and clinked her glass against ours. "The three best-looking women in Vermont."
We drank. The champagne went down easy, warm and bright, and for a moment the world was made of sunlight and lace and the smell of lavender and three women who loved each other laughing in a bedroom on a Saturday morning.
The knock came at the same moment I set my glass down, and we all went still.
"Ladies?" Ellis's voice came through the door, muffled and apologetic. "Guests are starting to arrive. Margaret, your boys are out here already and there are at least four of them, and I am not equipped for this."
Dana snorted into her mimosa. Margaret closed her eyes and pressed a hand to her chest, but she was smiling.
"Give us ten minutes, Ellis," I called, and my voice came out steadier than I felt. "Tell them we're not ready yet."
"He's going to tell them we're being beautiful," Dana stage-whispered. "That's what he does. He's the most decent man I've ever met. I'm going to marry him."
"You've been dating for eight months," I said, turning back to the mirror. "You're allowed to say that."
"I know, but it feels like saying it out loud makes it real. And if it's real, I have to start thinking about guest lists and caterers and whether my mother is going to have a heart attack when she finds out Ellis proposed at a church picnic." She paused. "He hasn't proposed. I'm getting ahead of myself."
"Not that far ahead," Margaret said softly, and Dana made a small, pleased sound.
I looked at myself in the mirror. The woman there had bright blue eyes and honey-blonde hair and a soft, rounded face. She wore a silver locket at her throat and a ring on her finger that had belonged to a grandmother she had never met, and today she was going to marry a man who thought she was a girl from out of state who had moved to a small town to make a new life.
And that was true. In a way, it was truer than he knew.
I reached up and touched the locket. Inside was a tiny photograph, one I had never seen, but I knew what it held because they had told me: a picture of a woman who did not exist, with a birth date that had never happened, with parents who had never lived. My backstory, carried close to my chest.
"No nerves," Dana said, reading my face. "You're allowed to have nerves, but you're not allowed to look scared. You've got this, Sabrina. You've got him."
"He's got me," I said, and it came out truer than I expected. "That's the thing. He's got all of me."
Margaret's hand settled on my shoulder, warm and solid. "Then you have nothing to be afraid of," she said. "Now let me finish this last pin, and then we'll go make my son the happiest man in Vermont."
It was not a clean thing, that sentence. It carried a tremble in the final word, and I felt Margaret's hand on my shoulder squeeze once before she let it fall.
"I'll go check on my boy," she said, and her voice had steadied itself by the time she turned. She pressed a kiss to my temple, quick and warm, and then she was gone, the door clicking shut behind her, leaving Dana and me alone in the soft gold light.
For a moment neither of us spoke. Dana swirled the last of her mimosa in its glass, watching me in the mirror, and I watched her watching, and there was a quiet intimacy to it that I had learned to love about us.
"So," she said. "You ready to put the dress on?"
The question hung in the air like a held breath. I looked at myself in the mirror, at the white silk robe, at the woman I had become, and I felt something flutter low in my stomach. Not fear, not quite. Anticipation, maybe, or the strange weight of a moment I had never imagined myself standing in.
"Yeah," I said. "I think I am."
Dana set her glass down on the nightstand and slid off the bed, padding across the floorboards to where the dress hung on the back of the door. It was white, of course, and old, and beautiful in a way that made my chest ache every time I looked at it. Margaret had brought it up the night before, carrying it herself, and she had told me the story of her own wedding day as she hung it: the church, the June heat, the way Allan's father had cried before she even reached the altar.
Now Dana lifted the zipper and held it up, the fabric catching the light. The lace trim shimmered faintly, cream against white, and I could see the years in it, the careful stitches where other hands had mended it, the way the hem had been let out and taken in and let out again for a generation of Cole women.
"You ready?" Dana asked again. Soft eyes, soft voice.
I nodded, and I reached for the belt of my robe. My fingers found the knot, and I pulled, and the silk slipped from my shoulders and pooled at my feet.
The air hit my skin, cool and goosebump-raising, and I felt Dana's gaze move over me. I stood in the lingerie I had picked out with her help six weeks ago, white lace trimmed with delicate pearl beading, sheer enough that I could see my own skin beneath if I looked down. The cups were deep and the fabric cut low, hugging every curve that Justin Zygurski had never had, and for a moment I was struck as I always was by the sheer physicality of what I was now, the weight and shape of a woman in all her soft, round fullness.
Dana let out a low whistle.
"Sabrina," she said. "That is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. Allan is going to lose his mind when he sees it tonight."
I felt the blush climb up my chest before it reached my face, spreading across my cheeks like wildfire. "It's just lingerie," I said, but my voice came out weaker than I meant it to.
"Just lingerie," Dana repeated, deadpan. "That's what they all say. Let me tell you something, best friend to best friend, when Ellis saw me in the burgundy set you helped me pick, he forgot how to speak for a solid minute. And your man is going to be worse."
"Dana."
"I'm serious." She crossed to me, the dress still in her hands. "You're going to be the most beautiful bride he's ever seen, and then tonight, when you take this dress off, he's going to forget his own name. You deserve that. And honestly? After eight months of saving himself for marriage, he earned that. That man is a saint with the patience of one."
I laughed despite myself, the sound shaking in my chest. "You're terrible."
"I'm supportive. There's a difference." She held up the dress, opening the back for me. "Arms up, bride."
I raised my arms, and she slipped the dress over my head. The fabric slid down my body like water, cool and smooth, settling over my hips and my breasts with a weight that felt ancient and blessing. Dana moved behind me, taking the zipper in her fingers, and I felt her tug it up carefully, inch by inch, the dress pulling tight across my back, the fitted bodice pressing against my ribs, my breasts lifted and shaped by the boning and the seams.
"There," she said, and her voice was soft now, almost reverent. "God, Sabrina. Look."
I turned to face the mirror.
The woman there was a stranger and a familiar, all at once. The dress had a sweetheart neckline that made the most of what I had been given, the lace trim framing the full white swell of my breasts, the fitted waist nipping in before the skirt fell away in soft waves of old-fashioned fabric that moved like water when I shifted. The pearls at the bodice caught the light, small and bright, and the lace sleeves ended at my elbows with delicate points.
Margaret's dress. Her wedding dress, the one she had worn on a June day decades ago, had been altered to fit me, and in the mirror I saw a bride.
I saw a bride, and for a moment I felt like one.
Dana came to stand beside me, and I saw her in the glass too, auburn-haired and flush-cheeked in her burgundy robe, and she was looking at me like I was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen, like something out of a story.
"It fits you," she said. "It's like it was made for you. Mama Margaret is going to cry again, and this time it's going to be a flood."
I touched the lace at my chest, the fabric soft under my fingers. "I don't know how to be this," I said, and I wasn't sure I knew what I meant by it until the words were out. "I don't know how to be a bride. I don't know how to be someone who gets to have this."
Dana took my hand, her fingers warm and sure. "You just have to show up," she said. "You just have to walk down the aisle and look at him and say yes, and let him love you. That's all a bride has to do. And you can do that, Sabrina. You've been doing it for eight months."
I looked at her, and something in my chest loosened. I squeezed her hand back.
"I'm going to marry him," I said, and it came out like a promise, like a pledge to myself as much as to her.
"You are," she said. "And you're going to be happy. I can feel it."
Outside, I could hear the murmur of voices, the sound of cars arriving, Ellis's carrying voice calling out instructions that were soundly ignored. Through the window I caught a glimpse of Margaret in the yard, her silver hair bright in the sun, standing beside a tall man in a suit who had his back to me, and I recognized Allan's broad shoulders, the way he moved, the shape of him even through a window.
My husband-to-be.
I reached up and touched the locket at my throat, the tiny weight of it warm against my skin. Then I turned away from the mirror, and I smiled, and I let Dana fix the train before we opened the door to the rest of my life.
Dana smoothed the train one last time, her hands brushing over the lace like a prayer, and then she was at the door, cracking it open and peering out. She glanced back at me with a grin that was all nerves and excitement, and I followed her into the hallway.
The stairs creaked under our feet, chorus of wood and old house, and with each step I felt the weight of the dress moving around me, the rustle of fabric like a whispered blessing. At the landing, Dana paused and took my hand, her fingers squeezing once. She did not say anything. She did not need to.
The front door was a rectangle of golden light that grew as we approached, spilling across the floorboards in a long, warm rectangle, and I could hear the murmur of voices beyond it, the soft strains of a guitar, Margaret's laughing call of welcome. I stopped at the threshold, my hand on the warm wood of the frame, and let myself be still.
Then I held my breath, and I pushed the door open into the light.