The Same Wedding Dress, Two Different Brides novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: Across the Street

Lauren throws Madeline out, and the tailor across the street walks over with the groom's measurements.

The door swung shut on its spring.

Madeline was still inside.

Through the glass I could see Evan's mother climbing into the back of the car, still talking.

"You've always known," I said.

"Since the first year." Madeline tucked her sunglasses into her hair. "Evan talks in his sleep. Did you know that? He used to fall asleep on my sofa after Sunday dinner with my parents. He'd say your name."

Shauna put her shears down on the counter very carefully.

"So you knew I was real," I said.

"Of course you were real. You were just never going to matter."

She walked back to the dress form, now empty, and ran a finger along its padded shoulder.

"Can I tell you something about the gala?" she said.

"No."

"My mother didn't find you in that coat line by accident. You were wearing green. Evan told me you'd be in green. I told my mother there was a woman in green who'd been following Evan for years, who wouldn't leave him alone, who'd turned up uninvited."

She smiled.

"I pointed."

Gran put down her beading needle.

It was the first time I'd seen her stop working in the middle of a bead.

"I wanted you to see it," Madeline said. "What it looks like when you try to stand next to him. Everyone turns around. Everyone knows. And Evan looks at his shoes."

"He did look at his shoes," I said.

"He always will."

She came closer.

She smelled like expensive gardenias and nothing else.

"Here's what's going to happen," she said, still soft, still pleasant. "You're going to finish my dress. It's lovely. I want it. And you're going to stay away from Trinity Church on the twentieth."

"I wasn't planning to go."

"Good. Because if you come near that church, I'll tell three hundred people exactly what you are. The girl who won't take a hint, who got herself pregnant to trap a Thorncroft."

She looked at my stomach.

"Everyone will believe it. They already do."

I took the tape measure from around my neck and rolled it up.

I put it in my pocket.

"Shauna," I said. "Get the door."

Shauna was across the shop before I'd finished saying it.

She yanked the door open so hard the bell fell off its bracket and bounced on the floor.

Madeline laughed.

"You're throwing out a forty-two-thousand-dollar client."

"I'm throwing out a woman who arranged to have me slapped in public," I said. "The client can come back for her fittings. She can talk to Shauna."

"You need my money."

"I need you out of my grandmother's shop more."

She didn't move.

So I walked up to her, took her by the elbow, very politely, and walked her to the door.

She was so surprised she let me.

On the top step she pulled her arm free and turned around.

Her face wasn't soft anymore.

"You'll regret this," she said.

"I've been regretting things since Wednesday," I said. "You're not even in the top three."

Shauna shut the door in her face.

Through the glass we watched Madeline stand on the step for one second too long.

Then her heel caught the edge, and her sunglasses slid off her hair and landed in the gutter.

She left them there.

The car pulled away from the curb.

Shauna turned around, picked the bell up off the floor and held it over her head.

"I have never loved you more," she said.

Gran went back to her beading.

Her needle went in and out three times before she spoke.

"Your great-grandmother threw a senator's wife out that door in 1968," she said. "Wrong color for a second marriage. You did it better."

I laughed, and then I didn't, and I went into the bathroom and ran the cold tap for a while.

When I came out, Shauna was standing at the front window with her arms folded.

"Don't look now," she said. "But somebody's watching."

I looked.

Directly across Tremont Street, behind the gold letters of Kehoe Tailoring, Aidan Kehoe stood in his window with a tape around his neck and a pincushion on his wrist.

He was just watching.

He'd seen the door fly open, and the bell, and Madeline in the gutter, and probably me in the window with a wet face.

When he saw me see him, he didn't look away.

He nodded once.

Then he turned the sign on his door to CLOSED and pulled his blind.

"Kehoes don't nod at Furlongs," Shauna said. "That's in the treaty."

"There isn't a treaty."

"There's a treaty in spirit."

At three o'clock Evan's car pulled up across the street.

Evan went into Kehoe Tailoring alone and didn't come out for fifty minutes.

I was cutting interfacing at the back table.

Shauna watched and reported every minute of it.

At six I was locking the till when somebody knocked on the glass.

Aidan Kehoe was standing on our top step, which no Kehoe had done in my lifetime.

He was holding a folded index card.

I opened the door three inches.

He held the card up between two fingers.

"Your groom," he said. "Thorncroft, Evan. Wedding morning suit."

"He isn't my groom."

"Funny. He thought he was, for about fifty minutes."

He flipped the card open so I could read his square, heavy handwriting.

"Groom's two inches bigger in the waist than he thinks," Aidan said. "Want me to leave it that way?"

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