When it’s finally over, we’re all left staring.

  “Oh, honey,” Ashleigh says. “Tell me you didn’t keep the dress.”

  21

  “I just haven’t had time to figure out what to do with it!” I cry, brushing past Julia to start stacking things back up.

  “No!” Julia yelps, yanking a box of thrifted-and-laundered ivory cloth napkins out of my hand. “You can’t just put this stuff back in there. Pandora’s box has been opened, Daphne.”

  “And Pandora’s contents aren’t going to fit in this living room with your big-ass life raft,” I say.

  “You’re going to have to get rid of it before you move anyway,” Ashleigh points out.

  Julia’s eyes snap to me. “You’re moving?”

  “Possibly,” I say. “But not until after the summer, at the earliest. I’ve got time to deal with this stuff.”

  Ashleigh faces Julia. “Maybe you could move into her room.”

  For Miles’s sake, I’m relieved to see Julia scrunch her nose in dismay. “No way. Staying here is a short-term solution only.”

  Now that I have an in, I ask, “Why the sudden interest in moving here, anyway?”

  Julia sucks her teeth for a second. “Can I tell you something without it getting back to Miles?”

  “Ooh, gossip!” Ashleigh pantomimes zipping her lips.

  “Fine,” I say. “But if you can tell me, I’m sure you can tell him.”

  Julia snorts. “I love my brother more than anyone on the planet, but there are things it’s better for him not to know.”

  “Such as?” Ashleigh presses.

  “I’ve been almost moving here for years.”

  “Weren’t you in college, in Wisconsin?” I ask.

  “I was miserable,” she says. “And I couldn’t tell Miles—he’d cosigned my loans.”

  “He would’ve understood,” I insist.

  “I know,” she says. “He babies me. And frankly, I’m not a huge fan of cleaning up my own messes. But the thing is, when I make one and Miles rushes in with a mop, he’s always leaving something behind.”

  I shake my head. “I don’t understand.”

  “When he graduated from high school,” she says, “he was supposed to move to Colorado with a couple of his friends. Last minute, he decided not to go. And I know it was because of me. Because I would’ve been stuck with my parents.

  “He waited until I left for college to even leave the state. He moved out here and he loved it. So when school started sucking, I was going to come too. But then he started dating Petra.”

  “Didn’t you two get along?” I ask, surprised.

  “Petra gets along with everyone,” Julia retorts. “But she’s also so fucking flighty. And I say that as a flighty person. I get sick of jobs. I get sick of roommates. I get sick of having bangs, four days after getting them.”

  Ashleigh says, “Well, that’s everyone.”

  “But Petra—she’s next level. Once she and Miles took a trip to Iceland and decided just to stay indefinitely. For like two months. I’m not even sure if it was legal. And then last winter, their two-week trip to Uruguay lasted five.

  “I didn’t want to move here if he didn’t really want to be here,” she explains. “Because I know him, and he’d feel stuck. But some things changed in my life recently, and now feels like the right time. But if something comes up—if Miles wants to move to Iceland, I just don’t want to be the reason he doesn’t. I can’t. He’s given up too much for me over the years.”

  My heart keens. I know what it’s like to have all your family concentrated in one person, to want what’s best for them after they’ve given you so much. But having heard Miles’s side of things, I can’t help but wish he knew how his sister felt.

  To him, he’s the brother who ran away. To her, he’s the one who stays, even when he shouldn’t.

  “You should tell him how you feel,” I say.

  “Interesting sentiment.” She grabs her water bottle for a long sip. “I can think of some other scenarios where it might apply.”

  Ashleigh rescues me with a firm clap. “Okay, back to the issue at hand. This stuff.”

  “Right,” Julia says. “Here’s what we do: we photograph and list everything we can online. Then I’ll ship things out as they’re bought. As a thank-you for letting me stay here.”

  “And I’ve got plenty of room for this stuff at my place in the meantime,” Ashleigh volunteers. “So we catalog it, list it, and then I’ll store it until it sells.”

  “Come on,” Julia says, reading my hesitancy. “Wouldn’t it feel good to just . . . let this stuff all go?”

  I scan the stuff in question. What am I waiting for?

  This, I think. Them. To not be alone. To have friends bear witness to the death of this dream.

  I take the box from Julia. “I’m ready.”

  She claps. “I’ll get the wine.”

  Ashleigh queues up a playlist she’s titled You’re Divorced, Not Dead, which has the urgency of a spin-class soundtrack. Julia pours us each a glass of sauvignon blanc, filling mine to the brim, and absolutely everything in the closet gets pulled out and laid across the living room floor.

  We move lamps around to get good lighting, and snap pictures like every piece is an element of a crime scene.

  I jot down quick descriptions, which Julia promises to post to a few different resale apps, and honestly, it’s kind of fun.

  Three glasses of wine and several hours later, we finally get to the dress itself.

  “Well, obviously you have to try it on,” Ashleigh says.

  “Yes.” Julia claps again.

  I shove the fabric at her. “You can, if you want.”

  “She’s not the one who chose it,” Ashleigh cuts in. “You did. Don’t you want one last look at it?”

  “More importantly,” Julia cuts in, “don’t you want your friends to see you looking drop-dead gorgeous in it before it’s Halloween and you’re driving past a frat house where some teenager in a Bride of Frankenstein wig is puking down the front of it?”

  She has a point. No one’s ever seen me in the dress, except my mom and my ex-almost-mother-in-law. If I’m sending it off, I could at least give it some fanfare.

  “Try. It. On,” Ashleigh chants. Julia immediately joins in. “Try. It. On! Try. It. On!”

  “Okay! Fine!” I relent. “I’ll try it on!”

  With a giddy squeal, Julia pushes the wadded-up dress back into my arms, and Ashleigh leans forward to top off my wine. “Atta girl,” she says.

  I turn and stuff myself in the bathroom to shuck off my work clothes.

  It takes a few tries to get the dress over my head, the layers of silk and organza twisting around me in increasingly nonsensical ways, until finally I manage to push my face through it like I’m clumsily hatching from a three-thousand-dollar egg.

  I hadn’t even wanted a wedding gown. I’d planned to find a cream silk or satin dress for a couple hundred bucks. But Peter’s mom had wanted me to at least try on some wedding dresses, and surprisingly, my mom agreed. Both of them had flown out for a weekend, to Virginia, and the three of us—Mom, Melly, and I—spent six exhausting hours sipping our way through the free champagne and Perrier of Richmond’s finest bridal boutiques.

  I’d been prepared to thank them both for their time and reassert my plans to just get a non-wedding dress, until our last stop of the day, a shop specializing in vintage dresses that Melly had read about online.

  Mom helped me put the dress on, and when she’d finished with the button at my nape, we both looked into the mirror and fell silent. She squeezed my shoulders and took a long, shuddering breath, her version of bursting into tears.

  Then she said, in a quiet, unsteady voice, “You look like Grace Kelly.”

  “I look nothing like Grace Kelly,” I whispered back.

  “It’s the one,” Mom said. “Isn’t it?”

  The dress was three thousand dollars, and I’d already—after much protestation—allowed Peter and the Collinses to pay for nearly everything. We would’ve had to have a courthouse wedding if Mom and I were footing the bill, and I was fine with that, but Peter’s family was traditional, and I wanted them to be happy.

  “I think I’ll go with something simpler,” I said, a knot in my throat.

  Mom sighed and pulled me in, resting her chin on my shoulder and holding my gaze in the mirror. “Let me do this.”

  “You’ve already done everything,” I told her. “Absolutely everything. And you don’t even believe in all this.”

  “Sweetie.” She smoothed my hair over my shoulder. “I believe in you. I believe you should and will have everything you’ve ever wanted, if you’re not too scared to go after it.”

  It was the first time, one of very few, that I’d wondered whether Mom really was as happy on her own as she seemed to be.

  “It’s the one,” she said again, kissing the side of my head. “You’re my one.”

  “You’re mine too,” I said.

  She smiled. “No, baby,” she said. “Now you’ve got two.”

  There had been no I always told you not to rely on men from her when things came crashing down. There had been only kindness, comfort, scathing criticisms of Peter.

  I still felt guilty about the dress, but whenever I brought up the possibility of paying her back, she joked that she actually owed me money, since I’d never needed her to bail me out of jail or replace a garage door I drove through “like a normal teen.”

  The way my mom talked about “normal teens” made it clear that she’d been the kind they write movies about, who sneak out bedroom windows and throw keggers in the woods.

  As I’m getting the dress over my shoulders, Ashleigh knocks and shouts something that sounds like a question at me through the door, but it’s unintelligible through the cocoon of fabric I’m fighting against. “Hold on!” I call back. “Give me a minute!” Another muffled reply.

  I finally manage to shake out all the layers, and turn my back to the mirror to feel around for the zipper. It jams three times before I coax it to my shoulder blades.

  Then I turn to examine the smooth silk bodice in the mirror over the sink. The high boatneck and bare arms. The flare of the skirt. The pockets the shop seamstress had added. I’d been so excited about the pockets.

  For a second, I let myself feel the sadness.

  I’m mourning the Victorian house with its porch, and the gorgeous new kitchen where Peter would cook me dinner. The kids we might’ve had, and the parents we would’ve become. The way that walking through the front door would feel like stepping into a warm hug.

  But honestly, the dress itself doesn’t have the same effect it used to. Possibly because it’s now a size and a half too small, the seams straining, my cleavage pushed up like I’m a Tessa Dare heroine courting scandal. Except Tessa’s cover models look sexy and courageous; I look baffled and ridiculous.

  I let myself out of the bathroom and sweep into the living room with a dramatic “Ta-da!”

  It’s incredibly anticlimactic, wearing your skintight wedding gown into an empty room.

  “Hello?” I creep toward the kitchen. It’s empty, though Ashleigh’s phone is on the counter, her playlist still blaring out “Love Is a Battlefield” via Bluetooth speaker.

  I traipse back into the living room, but there’s no sign of them. Behind me, the front door clanks open.

  I turn and stop short. So does Miles.

  “Hi,” I say.

  “Hi?” He says it like a question, a look akin to horror on his face.

  Probably because I’m drifting around the apartment in a gown for a wedding that never happened while Pat Benatar serenades me from the kitchen.

  “I’m not wearing this,” I say quickly.

  “Okay,” he says.

  “I mean, I am wearing this, but not by myself,” I explain.

  He looks around the empty apartment.

  “Your sister and Ashleigh were here!” I also look around the empty apartment, searching for proof I’m not having a Miss Havisham moment and instead finding wedding supplies everywhere. “They wanted to see the dress, so I put it on, and now they’re . . . somewhere.”

  He finally cracks a smile, takes off his sweatshirt, and tosses it over a chair. “I saw them getting into a cab downstairs. Apparently they needed milkshake supplies.”

  Which explained what Ashleigh was shouting at me when I was wrestling with the dress. “Ah.” I cross my arms in front of myself.

  “I’ll pay you to wear that to Peter and Petra’s wedding,” he says.

  “I’ll pay you more,” I say.

  His grin splits wide. “It’s a nice dress. You look nice.”

  I blush furiously. “I look like an overstuffed cannolo.”

  His head cocks. “What’s a cannolo?”

  “The singular version of cannoli,” I say.

  “So you look delicious,” he says.

  “It used to fit better. Or my vision’s just getting better. Or maybe it’s just, the longer this cuts off my oxygen, the prettier the hallucinations get.”

  “You look beautiful,” he says, then, with a slight twitch at the corner of his mouth, “even better than an Italian pastry.”

  As his gaze tracks over me, I get an unadulterated hit of his spicy-sweet scent and lurch toward the bathroom. “I’m gonna go change.”

  Inside, I lock the door and face the mirror. Red splotches have spread from the neckline up my throat.

  They basically spell out I STILL WANT MILES NOWAK.

  I push aside thoughts of what happened between us in his truck and reach back between my shoulders for the zipper. It glides down a few inches, then snags. I turn my back to the mirror and look over my shoulder as I wrestle the zipper over the bump in the fabric. I manage to tug it back up the tracks an inch, but when I draw it down again, it snags even worse.

  It won’t budge, and the bodice feels tighter than it did a minute ago. The more I mess with the zipper, the more panicked I become.

  My skin feels tender under the seams, my rib cage hurts, I can’t get a good breath, and The Dress. Is. Stuck.

  22

  I barrel out of the bathroom and smash into Miles, who’s been waiting in the hallway like a nervous first-time father pacing the hospital floors.

  “You’re still in it,” he says.

  “It’s stuck,” I say. “I think I broke the zipper, and the dress is too tight, and I can’t breathe, and it’s stuck.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “Oh, is it?” I say. “Then I feel better.”

  He’s turning me by the elbow. “I’ll get it. Just try to breathe.” He gathers my hair off my neck so carefully his fingers never brush skin. “Can you hold this out of the way?”

  I pin my hair against the back of my head, shoulders and arms throbbing as my heart pumps too much blood to my extremities.

  Miles pinches the two sides of the fabric and wiggles the zipper until it gives. At midback, it catches. “Shit. Hold on.”

  More pinching, wiggling, straining. I close my eyes and focus on my breath.

  The zipper goes up and glides down to the same snag.

  “Try to stay still,” he says.

  “You keep pulling me off balance,” I say.

  “Do you have any ChapStick?” he asks.

  “Can your mouth moisturization wait a minute?” I cry.

  “Nah, not really—it’s for the zipper, Daphne.”

  “In the medicine cabinet,” I tell him. We shuffle together into the cramped bathroom, him holding up the back of my dress as we go. I hand the tube to him and he does whatever it is he thinks he’s going to do with it, then goes back to wrestling the zipper.

  He loses purchase and smacks an elbow into the wall behind me with a grunt of pain. “It’s too cramped in here.”

  We shuffle-step back into the hall. He tries again, his frustrated huff turning into a laugh.

  “What?” I ask over my shoulder.

  “Now I can’t see anything.” He drags me by the skirt through his bedroom door, bumping the lights on.

  “Can you lean over the dresser?” he asks.

  “Seriously?” I say.

  “I need more leverage,” he says, “and every time I pull, you come with me.”

  Dear god, what did I do to deserve this?

  Oh, right. I lied about being in a relationship with this man, then jumped his bones at a lavender farm to upset my ex-fiancé. That could’ve done it.

  I brace my hands against the top of his dresser. He sets one palm to my hip, holding me steady while he pulls again, gets the zipper to move for several blissful millimeters before it catches again, his grip on me tightening.

  “Distract me,” I say under my breath.

  “I promise we’ll get this off of you,” he says.

  Wrong kind of distraction.

  “I’m feeling unbearably stupid right now, Miles, so you’re going to have to do better than that. Tell me something awful.”

  He laughs. “Okay. What about this: when Petra and I got your save-the-date in the mail, she told me she didn’t want to get married, and I was like, Cool, no worries. Because I thought she meant in general, not specifically that she didn’t want to marry me.”

  I drop my face toward the dresser. My pained groan gives way to something more forceful, the emotion shaking through my shoulders.

  “Shit,” he says. “I’m sorry. Not helpful.” Miles takes hold of both my hips. “Hey.”

  I straighten up, shaking my head as the laughter racks me, tears leaking from my eyes.

  “Daphne,” he murmurs behind me, still tender and sweet, pulling me in, my back to his chest, and coiling his arms around my waist.

  “Miles,” I finally manage, spinning in his grip. “What was the ChapStick for?” Another fit of laughter throttles my voice.