For Our 10th Anniversary, My Husband Gave Me a Green Dress and My Sister a Baby novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Green Dress
At her tenth anniversary party Phoebe opens Graeme's gift, a green maternity dress, and Bethany walks in wearing its twin and fourteen weeks pregnant. Phoebe takes off her ring and leaves; Abel is waiting at her car.
Graeme tapped his glass with a fork, and thirty people in our living room stopped talking.
It was our tenth anniversary, and he had thrown me a party in the house we had bought together.
I stood by the fireplace in my cream silk blouse with a glass of champagne I hadn't touched.
His doctor's office had called the landline at five o'clock, and he had taken it out in the garage, like always.
When he came back in, he was smiling.
"Ten years ago today," he said, "I married the only woman who ever saw through me."
Everybody laughed.
"Phoebe told me on our third date what her father did to her mother. I looked her in the eye and promised I would never hurt her like that."
He found me across the room.
"I have kept that promise every day since."
My throat closed up, and I smiled back at him.
My mother had made me promise to enjoy tonight, so I tried.
Bethany was in the kitchen with the cake.
My half-sister had baked it herself, three layers, lemon, because lemon was my favorite and she had remembered.
She had been so good to me this year.
She came to every Sunday lunch, she worked the showroom events for Graeme, and she called me Pheebs when no one else was allowed to.
"Tonight is going to change everything for us," Graeme said. "In a good way. Trust me."
Then he lifted a white box tied with gold ribbon off the mantel and put it in my hands.
"Open it."
The whole room leaned in.
I pulled the ribbon and folded back the tissue paper.
It was a dress, a long dark green satin one.
Nobody in that room knew what the color meant except my mother and Graeme.
The night my father left her, he had given my mother a green dress and told her to wear it so the neighbors would think nothing was wrong.
I had told Graeme that story over a plate of cold fries when I was twenty-five.
He had held my hand across the table.
Now I held the dress up by its straps, and my hands began to shake.
The waist was gathered high under where the bust would be.
The sides had panels of stretch fabric sewn in.
The tag inside the neckline said Size 6, Maternity.
"Graeme," I said.
"Put it on," he said gently. "It's the right size. We checked."
We.
The kitchen door swung open behind him.
Bethany came out wiping her hands on her apron.
Then she untied the apron and let it drop on the floor.
Underneath she was wearing the same green dress.
It stretched smooth over a round belly I had somehow never noticed, and she laid one hand on it.
"Fourteen weeks," Bethany said. Her voice wobbled.
"I'm so sorry, Pheebs. We didn't want you to find out any other way."
Nobody moved.
Then I heard the small electronic chimes of phones coming up, one after another, until a dozen of them were pointed at my face.
Graeme stepped in beside her.
He put his arm around her waist, in front of the people who had come to toast his marriage.
"We wanted you to hear it together," he said, "with everyone who loves us. Please don't make a scene, Phoebe."
I looked at his hand on her hip.
The hand with the wedding band I had picked out for him.
"Is it yours?" I asked him.
"It's ours," he said. "All three of us."
A woman by the bookshelf made a sound in her throat.
Bethany was crying now, and Graeme was holding her up, and the whole room was waiting for me to be the one who fell apart.
I folded the green dress back into its tissue paper and set the lid on the box.
I took off my wedding ring, and it came off easily, because I had lost eight pounds that year.
I put it in the middle of the lemon cake Bethany had baked for me, right on top of the ten sugar roses.
"Happy anniversary," I told my husband.
Then I took my keys off the hook and walked out.
Nobody followed me.
The October air on the porch was cold, and I got to my car without my coat.
A man was leaning on the driver's door with his arms crossed.
Abel Sorensen, Graeme's partner, who owned forty percent of the company and had not said ten words to me at the party.
He pushed himself upright when he saw me.
"Phoebe, don't go home tonight," he said. "And whatever Graeme hands you, don't sign anything."
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