Page 45 of Babies for the Boss
I look at her for a moment. “Is that a yes?”
The smile grows by a degree, and I watch it grow, and underneath it there is something that hurts to see—a twinge of sadness, the trace of a thing she is setting aside in favor of what she has to do. I do not acknowledge that pain, but I will not pretend it doesn’t exist.
I will give Molly Bennett the life she deserves. Better, even.
“Yes, Pavel,” she says quietly, and the sadness in her smile is a small blade that I accept as my due. “I’ll marry you.”
17
MOLLY
The womanin the mirror is a stranger.
She has my hair—the stylist has done something architectural with it, soft curls pinned into an elegant knot with a few loose pieces framing the face—and my eyes, and the slightly crooked set of my mouth that I’ve never been able to train into anything more symmetrical. She’s familiar and not me, but I could almost see the connection.
Except she is wearing a dress that costs more than three months of rent in Manhattan combined, and her skin has been touched up by someone who clearly went to school for the purpose of making other people’s skin look like that, and she’s sitting in a bridal suite in a hotel that Pavel selected, in a city that swallowed me whole years ago and has not yet finished deciding what to do with me.
She looks like a bride. She looks like someone who chose this.
I have chosen this, technically. I need to remember that.
“You look beautiful,” Vet says, from the chair in the corner where she has positioned herself with the quiet authority shebrings to all spaces she occupies, her dark eyes moving between me and the door and the window in the regular rotation that I have come to recognize as her version of at rest. She’s wearing a deep charcoal dress that manages to be both appropriate for a wedding and entirely practical for a woman who has a gun somewhere on her person, which I have stopped questioning and started finding oddly comforting.
I imagine she’s carrying more than one gun. “I look like someone else.”
“You look like yourself in an exceptional dress and properly done up.” She tilts her head slightly. “The two are not mutually exclusive.”
The stylist, a small, efficient woman named Helena who has spoken approximately forty words in the past two hours and communicated everything else through the precise language of her hands, makes a final adjustment to the knot at the back of my head and steps away to assess her work with the critical detachment of an artist evaluating a canvas. Whatever she finds there satisfies her.
It’s strange. I’ve been thinking about Carrie Ann since the moment Pavel told me that the wedding would be quiet. No guests. No family, no friends, nothing that would draw attention ahead of time.
I understood the logic, which is one of the more inconvenient things about loving a man who is very good at keeping me safe. The logic was sound, and the reasoning was correct, and I nodded along with it and then went home to my apartment and sat on my couch and thought about Carrie Ann Kohler for a long time in the dark.
We met in the third grade. She sat down next to me at lunch on my first day at a new school—we had moved again, which we did regularly, another apartment in another part of Manhattan, Kansas, due to my mother following the geography of her unhappiness from one address to the next as though the problem lived in the walls rather than in her. Carrie Ann put half her sandwich on my mostly empty tray without preamble and said that her mom always packed too much and asked if I wanted it. Turkey and Monterey Jack with mustard.
I said yes, and it was one of the best things I had ever eaten. That was the entire foundation of the longest relationship of my life. She saw what I had on my tray—just French fries, because that was all Mom could afford—and shared what she had. That’s Carrie Ann in a nutshell.
She’s five foot three inches of relentless warmth and terrible puns and an evangelical devotion to homemade mac and cheese that I have consumed in quantities that should probably concern a physician. She hates her long blonde curls that she’s been trying to tame since adolescence, and her big green eyes that go wide and expressive when she’s excited. Hates them because they tell on her frequently, because Carrie Ann approaches most of life with the enthusiasm of someone who has decided that the alternative is not worth considering.
I left her behind when I came here, which is the plainest way to say something that has never felt plain. I left because New York had been my dream since I was old enough to understand that dreams were directional, that they pointed somewhere specific, and mine had always pointed here.
We promised that when we got married—not if, when, because Carrie Ann approaches hypothetical futures with the same enthusiasm she applies to present ones—we would beeach other’s maid of honor. We pinky swore, which we both understood was binding in the way that adult contracts only wish they were.
She doesn’t know I’m getting married today.
She doesn’t know I’m pregnant, because that’s a liability for now. She doesn’t know about Pavel, about any of it. She knows I work for a powerful man in a complicated industry, because that’s the version of the truth that fits in a weekly phone call without requiring a two-hour debrief and a significant amount of prior context. She knows I’m happy, or happier than I was, or happy in the complicated way that things can be happy when they contain multitudes.
I look at the stranger in the mirror and think about pinky swears and airport goodbyes and the loneliness of a happy occasion that no one who loves you is present for.
“You’re thinking loudly,” Vet says.
“Am I?”
“You have been since Helena finished your hair. Your face does a thing when you are being sad while trying not to be.”
I look at her reflection in the mirror. “What kind of thing?”
“The kind where you are very still, and your eyes go somewhere else.” She tilts her head. “Cold feet?”
