Total pages in book: 151
Estimated words: 140874 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 704(@200wpm)___ 563(@250wpm)___ 470(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 140874 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 704(@200wpm)___ 563(@250wpm)___ 470(@300wpm)
“Nana, that’s Sophie. Remember? The divorce?” Emma leaned across the table to remind Rose in a low, gentle tone.
“Oh, yes, yes.” Rose waved her hand and laughed. “Do forgive me, Sophie.”
“Forgiven.” There was no way I could hold a slip of the tongue against a woman who’d had a very serious stroke only a year and a half ago.
It hadn’t worn down her tenacity any. “Now, now, I’m serious, little bird. Doesn’t it upset you that you won’t be giving Emma away?”
Neil wiped his mouth on his napkin, chuckling. “Mother, how can I give her away? She’s never really belonged to me. She has been her own person since the day she was born.”
I looked at Emma. Normally, this kind of praise from her father would have pleased her immensely. But she just gave a tight smile to everyone and looked down at her plate.
“I think it’s wonderful.” It was Pamela, Valerie’s best friend since college and one of Emma’s godmothers, who’d made the remark in gentle support. Pamela was exactly what I’d imagine a friend of Valerie’s to be: beautiful, slender, smartly dressed, with a voice like it had been soaked in whiskey and dried with cigarettes. Her ginger hair was pulled up in a perfect twist frozen with industrial strength hairspray. The elegant way she carried herself made her black, ribbed turtleneck seem more fancy than casual. She had a wonderfully posh accent, not unlike Neil’s.
She went on, “You know, I’ve always thought the idea of ‘giving away the bride’ was a bit absurd. Who owns her, then? Michael? Good luck to you.”
We laughed at that, even Emma.
“Sophie, are you going to have someone give you away?” Valerie asked, fixing me with an expectant look.
Neil’s family went silent.
Oh fuck, he hadn’t told them.
“What’s this?” Rose piped up. “Neil, are you getting married again?”
Yeah, Neil. Are you? My face got hot.
“Tonight isn’t about us,” Neil covered smoothly. “It’s about Emma and Michael.”
But Rose was tenacious. “Of course it’s about Emma and Michael, but right now I’m asking you. Are you and Sophie getting married?”
“Sophie and I are engaged.” Still not an answer to my question, but I would rather choke on something sharp than admit we were having troubles in front of Valerie.
Neil accepted the congratulations of his brothers, and their wives cooed over my ring, and all the while I wanted to sink to the floor and never have to make eye contact with any of them again. It was a relief when my phone rang.
“I have to take this,” I lied. It was my mother, and I didn’t have the strength to talk to her right now. But she’d provided me an out, bless her.
“The reception in here is awful,” Michael called after me.
I raised my phone as if in another toast. “I will try the street.”
When I exited the dining room, I made a sharp left and headed for the bathroom. I needed to sit and carefully dab at my eyeliner and practice my ecstatic-twenty-five-year-old-fiancé-of-a-billionaire face. It was going to take a lot of work, in the mental state I was in.
The bathroom was brick-tiled, the walls cream stucco. Maybe it was supposed to make patrons feel like they were whizzing in Tuscany. The bathroom stalls were standard, though, and there wasn’t an attendant, so I didn’t feel bad about slipping into one of the cubicles, barring the door, and leaning against the wall for as tearless a cry as I could manage.
I remembered the conversation Holli and I’d had after we’d shared news of our engagements. That seemed a lifetime ago. Time passed oddly without my best friend. And I’d sacrificed her for what? For a man I loved, but who possibly was done with me?
I pulled up the browser on my phone and, with shaking thumbs, entered, “signs not get married” into the search bar. There, three links down, was the article I’d forced myself to not look at that day.
Without really knowing what my expectation was, I found myself relieved when the first items had to do with unfaithfulness, substance abuse, and differing religions. Neil had never, to my knowledge, cheated on me; our fairly open relationship should have meant he never had to go behind my back in the first place. We both kind of abused substances, like when we drank or smoked the occasional J, but it didn’t seem like a problem to us, and it had certainly never caused problems between us. As for religion, maybe his Protestant upbringing against my Catholic one would have been an issue if either of us hadn’t been atheists, but there we were.
The rest of entries in the list were things like, “You fight constantly,” and “He tries to control you.” While Neil was awfully bossy in the bedroom, he wasn’t consistently so outside of it. If anything, his lack of input was more frustrating than any need for control he might have had. Sometimes, I just wanted him to be the proverbial coin flip when it came down my life decisions, and he was maddeningly neutral until pressed. Other times, he couldn’t resist micromanaging our lives, but he never told me what to wear or eat.