The Same Wedding Dress, Two Different Brides novel · Chapter 11 of 32

Chapter 11: Hem

Evan's mother sat very still with the pieces in her lap.

Then she stood up, and the paper fell around her shoes onto Gran's rug.

"You've just made a very expensive mistake," she said.

"I'm seventy-eight," Gran said. "I don't have time for cheap ones."

"Mrs. Thorncroft," I said. "Get out of my grandmother's front room."

She went.

She left her tea untouched in the wedding china, and the black car pulled away before the door had even shut.

Gran got down on her knees and picked up every piece of the check.

She put them in an envelope and wrote the date on it.

Over the next five weeks, fittings filled the shop.

Shauna did all of Madeline's.

Madeline came twice more, with her mother once, and both times she asked for me, and both times Shauna said I was resting on doctor's orders and smiled with all her teeth.

I had two more scans.

The baby was still small, still curled, still thinking.

She grew a little.

Not enough for the doctor to smile, but enough for her not to frown.

On the night of Wednesday, June seventeenth, I finished the dress.

I did it sitting down.

I'd covered the thirty buttons myself, one by one, in scraps of the same ivory faille.

That night I sewed them onto the back.

Then I set the lace sleeves for good, unpicking my old pins and stitching my great-grandmother's lace in with a needle so fine I had to hold it to the lamp.

Then I turned up the hem by hand.

Four yards of hem.

Every stitch small enough to disappear.

At ten o'clock I looked up and rolled my neck.

Across the street, Aidan's light was on.

He'd been working late every night that week, same as me.

Evan's morning suit hung on a form in his window: the gray waistcoat, the striped trousers, the black tailcoat.

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