Chapter 20: Union Station

Hugh came out of the shower with a towel around his waist and read the text over my shoulder.

"Those are fakes," he said.

"I know they're fakes."

"Are you going to answer her?"

I closed the blue velvet box and put it in my dresser drawer.

"I'm going to do her bustle," I said.

At four-fifteen on Saturday I carried Shayla's gown through the side door of Union Station in its long white bag.

The rotunda was enormous.

A copper dome, a ceiling of glass, the last gray light of December coming down through it onto rows of white chairs.

There were no flowers.

There was no quartet and no cake.

There were just the chairs and the marble and two hundred and forty guests in their good coats, whispering.

Mrs. Meade sat in the fourth row in navy velvet, unwrapping a sandwich from wax paper.

Bonnie sat beside her in her derby hoodie under a blazer, because she said she was dressed for anything.

A reporter from the News Tribune stood by a pillar with a notebook.

The side room was a little office with a mirror and a radiator.

Shayla stood in it in her slip with three bridesmaids around her, her hair pinned up perfectly, the Meade emerald on her hand.

The fake pearls were in her ears.

"You came," she said. "Good girl."

I hung the bag on the hook and unzipped it.

I closed every hook up her back, all forty-two of them, and this time the waist met.

She turned in the mirror.

She was beautiful.

"Do you like my earrings?" she said, touching one. "I had them made from the party video. Five hundred dollars. You can't even tell."

"I can tell."

"Nobody else can." She smiled at me in the mirror. "Bustle me, seamstress. I'm not dragging silk across a train station."

I knelt behind her and took the train in my hands.

Eleven loops under the lace, eleven satin buttons.

I hooked them up one by one, and the long train rose off the floor into soft folds.

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