Chapter 3: What Margot Kept
I set the alteration order back down on the marble counter.
I set it down slowly.
Not because I was calm.
Because I needed my hands to be doing something or I was going to come apart in the middle of a bridal salon with cream velvet sofas and the smell of gardenias, and I was not going to do that.
"The money was left in her will," I said.
"I know because I was there when it was read.
Grandmother left thirty thousand pounds to me directly.
It was not left to you to give, Mother.
It was left to me."
"And what would you have done with it?" she said.
"Spent it on that dress?
On flowers you could have bought anywhere?"
"I would have spent it on my wedding."
"This is a wedding," she said.
"That is the point."
Sienna was still in my gown.
She had not moved toward the fitting room.
She had not offered to take it off.
"Sienna," I said.
"Take the dress off, please."
"Juliet—"
"Take it off."
Something shifted in the room.
Sienna looked at my mother.
My mother gave the smallest nod.
"We'll have it back to you before June," Sienna said.
"We only needed—"
"You needed it for June seventh," I said.
"Your wedding.
At my venue.
With my fiancé.
In my dress.
On my date."
Graham pressed two fingers to his forehead.
"Jules, I know how this looks."
"Does it look like eleven months of my grandmother's money and four hundred hours of my hands?" I said.
"Because that is what it is."
He didn't answer.
Margot had not moved from behind the counter.
She was standing very still with her hands flat on the glass.
I glanced at her and she met my eyes.
There was something in her face.
Not pity.
Something more careful than that.
"Ms.
Hale," she said.
"There's something else."
My mother turned sharply.
"Margot, I don't think—"
"She has a right to know," Margot said.
Quietly.
But she didn't look away.
She reached beneath the counter and brought up a second document.
Thicker than the alteration order.
A folder, cream-colored, with the Atelier Fontaine crest at the top.
She placed it in front of me.
"Your grandmother came into this atelier fourteen months ago," Margot said.
"She commissioned the gown herself.
She placed the deposit herself.
She chose the lily-of-the-valley herself.
She told me—" Margot paused, and her voice dropped.
"She told me it was for her eldest granddaughter's wedding.
She told me her name was Juliet.
She told me she wanted it to be the most beautiful thing she ever made with her own two hands, sitting at the table, just the two of them, over three weekends."
The room was completely silent.
I looked down at the folder.
There was a photograph inside.
My grandmother, Nora, seated at a long wooden worktable.
Her white hair.
Her reading glasses pushed up on her forehead the way she always wore them.
And spread before her, in pencil, a sketch of the gown.
My gown.
Her handwriting was at the bottom of the sketch.
*For Juliet.
Every stitch.*
My throat closed.
"She commissioned it," I said.
"Yes," Margot said.
"She sat here and drew it."
"Three Saturdays in a row," Margot said.
"She brought her own thread samples.
She knew exactly what she wanted."
I heard my mother make a sound behind me.
Not a word.
A sound.
"You knew," I said.
I did not turn around.
She didn't answer.
"You knew Grandmother commissioned this gown for me and you still signed your name on an order to give it to Sienna."
"Your grandmother is gone," my mother said.
"And decisions have to be—"
"Say her name," I said.
"What?"
"Say her name.
Say Nora.
Say your mother's name while you tell me that her wishes don't matter."
The silence that followed was the longest in that room.
I closed the folder carefully.
I picked it up off the counter.
"I'm taking this," I said to Margot.
"Of course," Margot said.
I looked at Graham one more time.
He was standing with Sienna's heels still in his hand, and the expression on his face was something I recognized — not guilt, exactly.
More like the look of a man who had been hoping very hard that a situation would resolve itself without him having to do anything.
I had loved that man for three years.
"I'll be in touch with my solicitor about the deposit," I said.
"And about the gown."
I walked to the door.
The little brass bell chimed when I opened it.
Behind me, I heard my mother say, very quietly, to no one in particular: "She'll come around."
I stepped out into the evening air.
She had said that same sentence at my father's funeral, when I had stood at the graveside and refused to leave.
*She'll come around.* As if grief were something you simply waited out.
May you like
I had my grandmother's folder under my arm.
And for the first time since six o'clock that evening, I knew exactly what I was going to do next.
