The Same Wedding Dress, Two Different Brides novel · Chapter 25 of 32

Chapter 25: A Reason

I put the veil down on the table.

It slid off the edge onto the floor, and neither of us picked it up.

"You want a reason," I said.

"I want the truth. If it's no, I'll go. I'll be fine. I'll make rich men in Manhattan look better than they deserve."

"You'd hate it."

"I'd hate it," he agreed. "That's not a reason."

I got up off my stool.

My legs had been working properly for three months, and I still wasn't used to it.

I walked around the cutting table until there was nothing between us but the soup.

"You drove me to the hospital in a van full of grooms," I said. "You sat in the waiting room sewing a buttonhole. You fed me a roast beef the size of a shoebox and told me to shut up and eat it."

"I didn't say shut up."

"You said it with your face."

He didn't argue.

I could hear my voice going. I let it. "You hold my daughter every day at noon and tell her about trousers."

"She likes trousers."

"She hates trousers. She likes you."

He was very still.

"You stood up at City Hall and said if they took my shop off the street, you'd have nobody to fight," I said. "So stay and fight me. That's the reason. Me. Us. Her. This street."

His hands came out of his pockets.

"Say it plainer," he said. "I'm a tailor. I need the measurements."

"I don't want you to go to New York, Aidan. I want you here. I want you."

He breathed out.

"Then I'm saying no," he said. "I'll call them Monday."

"Your mother will kill you."

"My mother got married in the back door of this shop at nine o'clock at night. She'll understand."

He came around the last corner of the table.

He didn't kiss me.

He took the pencil out of my hair, the way he had on the step in June, and put it in his own shirt pocket.

"Gran has the baby," I said.

"I know. I saw her go to the bus at five with the basket."

"Kehoe policy."

"I don't look across the street," he said. "Ever."

I took his hand.

I turned off the workroom lamp.

I locked Furlong's door behind us, and we crossed Tremont Street in the dark together, and nobody was watching from either window for the first time in fifty years.

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