My Stepsister Is Photographing My Wedding to Someone Else novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Fitting

Romy zips Ivy's gown in the shop mirror, and Dee points out that Ivy never once looked at her own reflection.

The bridal shop on Broughton Street smelled like steam and gardenias.

I stood on a little round platform in front of three mirrors, wearing a gown I had picked out eight months ago.

It was ivory, with a fitted bodice and a skirt that fell straight to the floor.

The seamstress knelt at my hem with pins in her mouth.

Romy stood in the corner with her camera, using the long mirror to frame me.

"Don't look at me," she said. "Look at yourself."

"I don't like looking at myself."

"Nobody does. Try anyway."

I tried.

The woman in the mirror was twenty-eight, with a dark knot of hair and gray eyes and a dress that fit her.

She looked like a bride on a bridal website.

She looked like someone who had stopped being surprised.

The shutter clicked.

"Better," Romy said. "That's a real face. A little sad."

"I'm not sad."

"Then it's a tired face."

"It's a tax-season face. I do twelve returns a day in March."

"It's October."

"It's a face that remembers March."

Romy laughed behind the camera, short and surprised.

The seamstress stood and brushed off her knees.

"The zipper sticks," she said, with the pins still in her teeth. "Let me get a different one."

She went into the back room.

The shop got very quiet.

It was just me, three mirrors, and the woman who had taken my jaw in her fingers on Saturday.

"The zip's still open at the top," I said.

"I see that."

"Would you mind?"

I turned my back to her.

The gown gaped from my shoulder blades down to my waist, and I felt cold air on my skin.

Romy put the camera on a chair.

She came up behind me and stood there for a second without touching anything.

I watched her in the mirror.

She looked at the zipper, and then she looked at the middle of my back, and her throat moved once.

"Hold your hair," she said.

I lifted the knot of hair with both hands.

Her knuckles brushed my spine.

The zipper went up an inch at a time.

I watched our reflections, her tall and tan, me pale and half dressed, her bleached head just above my shoulder.

Every inch of zipper made a quiet sound.

When it reached the top, her fingers lingered at the nape of my neck.

They were warm, and a little rough.

"There," she said, and her voice came out lower than I had heard it.

"Thank you."

"It's my job."

"Zipping is your job?"

"Today it is."

I let go of my hair, and the knot fell loose over her hand.

Neither of us moved.

In the mirror, I saw her eyes find mine.

They were brown, with a ring of gold near the center.

I had never noticed that they were brown.

I had sat across a table from them on Saturday and never noticed.

Her hand slid away.

She went back to the chair and picked up the camera.

"Okay," she said. "Turn to the left. Chin down. No, don't tuck it. Down, not tucked."

I turned.

She took forty pictures.

I did what she asked, and my eyes kept going to the corner where she stood.

When the seamstress came back with a new zipper, I was breathing.

Dee arrived at eleven for her own bridesmaid fitting.

Dee Mabry had been my best friend since our first week of college.

She was twenty-eight, an ER nurse with red curls tied up on her head and no filter at all.

She dropped her bag, hugged me, and looked at the photographer in the corner.

"You must be the stepsister," she said.

"Romy."

"Dee. I've heard nothing about you."

"That's fair."

"Ivy said you were quiet."

"I am," Romy said. "I'm a professional at it."

"Sure you are."

Dee turned to the seamstress and was lost in a discussion of lavender chiffon.

Romy took pictures of her for a while, and Dee made faces at the lens.

At noon Romy packed her bags and said she'd send me the proofs by Thursday.

"Thank you for today," I said.

"Thank the zipper."

She slipped out through the glass door, and a bell rang above it.

I stood on the platform in my gown.

Dee came up beside me with a mouth full of pins she'd stolen.

"So," she said.

"So?"

"I watched you for an hour. You don't have to answer, I just watched."

"Okay."

"You never looked in the mirror once."

"I looked at myself in the first few."

"You looked at yourself for a minute and a half," Dee said. "After that, Ivy, you looked at her."

I opened my mouth to say that I hadn't.

Nothing came out.

Dee spat the pins into her hand and gave me a long, kind, steady look I knew from years of bad nights.

"I'm not saying anything," she said. "I'm just a nurse. I notice a pulse."

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