Page 46 of Babies for the Boss
“No.”
Vet is quiet for a moment. “Because your family is not here? Friends?”
“My mother hasn’t been well enough to travel in years, which I believe approximately forty percent of the time, and suspect issixty percent an excuse to avoid a city she finds overwhelming and a daughter whose life she can’t quite support since I left her behind.” I look at my hands in my lap, at the absence of a ring that will be there in a few hours. “My father died when I was a teenager.” I stop, aware that I’m cataloging losses on my wedding morning, which is not a productive exercise. “I just wish my best friend was here. She would make this into something. She makes everything into something.”
“What kind of something?”
I almost smile despite myself. “She would have opinions about the dress. Strong ones. She would have cried already, at least twice. She would have brought food—she always brings food, she considers it a personality trait, and honestly, she’s right—and she would have made this feel like a real wedding instead of a?—”
“Instead of a what?”
I look at myself in the mirror, at the stranger in the expensive dress. “Instead of a survival strategy.”
Helena’s eyes flicker with interest, but still she says nothing and does things to my hair I don’t understand with a spray can and a rattail comb.
Vet looks at me for a long moment with those quiet dark eyes. “Is that what you believe it is?”
“Not entirely. And yes.” Kind of.
Did I think that Pavel and I would head down the aisle one day? I have no idea. But when I think about him, I still get butterflies. And bees.
That stupid vibrator incident. It wasn’t until then that I realized Pavel had a silly side, a genuinely, unexpectedly, tears-streaming-down-your-face silly side, hidden beneath all that controlled precision like a loose thread in an expensive suit.
And it’s not just that. He sees me. That’s the thing I keep returning to, the thing that keeps rearranging my resistance into something more yielding. He has been seeing me for years, in the way that means paying attention to the actual person rather than the useful version of them.
Helena packs up and slips out with the quiet efficiency of a woman paid well for both her skill and her discretion, and Vet stands and moves to the window to do her rotation in better light. I’m sitting alone with my reflection and my complicated feelings.
I know that this is just a moment in time. That this wedding is a survival tactic more than something based on love. I can’t marry for love in the future if I’m dead, so one day, I’ll?—
The door swings wide, so I turn. And scream.
Vet moves, and suddenly a gun is aimed at the doorway.
Standing in the doorway is Carrie Ann Kohler.
She’s wearing a dusty rose dress, which she clearly bought for this occasion, and has the slightly breathless look of someone who has traveled a significant distance in a short time and is choosing to accept the gun pointed at her head as a temporary complication rather than a dealbreaker. Her gigantic green eyes move from the gun to my face and back to the gun.
“That’s my best friend!” I’m already out of my chair, one hand up toward Vet, the other reaching toward the door. “Vet, that’s Carrie Ann, please don’t?—”
Vet lowers the gun with the smooth efficiency of someone completing a movement rather than abandoning one, and her expression maintains its default composure. In fact, come to think of it, her expression didn’t even shift when she was about to shoot. “My apologies.”
“No, totally, I get it,” Carrie Ann says, in the tone of someone who does not entirely get it but has decided that getting it is the expedient choice. Her green eyes are still wide. Her curls have settled around her shoulders in the slightly chaotic halo they always form, and she is clutching a small overnight bag. I cross the room in three steps and pull her into a hug that has six years of distance in it.
She hugs back with the full force of someone who has been waiting to do exactly this, and for a moment, we stand in the middle of the bridal suite holding on, and I feel something unlock in my chest that I hadn’t realized was locked.
“You’re here,” I say into her shoulder.
“Um, yeah,” she says into mine. “Do you think I was going to miss this? Pavel called me. He explained—well, not everything, but enough, and he asked if I would come and be your maid of honor, and he flew me here first class, and there was a car waiting, and—” She pulls back enough to look at my face, and her green eyes go immediately glassy, which is Carrie Ann right on schedule. “You look absolutely stunning. I’m going to cry. I’m already crying. Don’t let me ruin my makeup.”
“You’re not wearing makeup yet,” I point out.
“Then I have time to cry.” She cups my face in both hands and looks at me with those green eyes, searching the way she has always searched, reading me the way only someone who hasknown you since you were eight years old can read you. “Are you okay? Really? Are you in there under all this?”
There’s the complicated answer and the one I have time for. “I think I might be.” Strange that it might be true.
“Okay. Give me five minutes for makeup, and let’s get you married.”
“I like her,” Vet says approvingly. “She doesn’t shake easily.”
