He Thought I Had Nowhere to Go Until I Disappeared novel · Chapter 19 of 24

Chapter 19: The Green Dress

By nine the last car had gone down the lane, and Grandma Ardis had washed eleven cups herself and refused to be helped.

At ten she called me upstairs to the blue room, where a long box lay open on the bed.

Inside, in tissue paper that smelled of cedar, was a dress.

It was dark green velvet, long-sleeved and cut low at the back.

"Your mother wore it to my sixtieth," Grandma said. "She said it was the only thing she owned that made her feel like a person who gets asked to dance."

I touched the sleeve.

"Try it. I'll sit here and criticize."

It fit as though she had made it for me.

Grandma looked at me in the mirror for a long time and then looked at the ceiling.

"Well," she said. "That's your mother's chin."

I went downstairs in the dress, to show Nolan, because there was nobody else I wanted to show.

He was on the porch, with his coat open and a cold bottle of beer he hadn't drunk.

He turned when the door opened.

For a moment he didn't say anything at all.

"No," he said.

"No?"

"I'm not going in that ballroom with you."

I stared at him.

"You are. You said..."

"I said I'd drive. I'll park the truck and wait by the doors." He put the bottle down on the rail. "Every word he said in that garage today was about me, Keeley. Boat yard, lien, charity. He'll say it again in front of two hundred people. Look who she's standing next to."

"I know what he'll say."

"Then you know I'm the first thing he'll point at."

"Then he can point."

"You don't get it." His jaw worked. "If I'm on your arm, the first thing in that room is a story about the neighbor. Not the money. Not Alana. I'm not going to be the thing that takes it off you."

"Nolan."

"I'm serious."

"So am I."

I walked to him until the velvet touched his jeans.

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