Page 2 of Rogue
I stood there.The quartet finished tuning and went quiet.Below, guests quietly settled into their seats.
I hadn’t cried since the second tranche had cleared.
The door was four steps away and I’d taken two of them when I heard him.
My father’s voice.Low and clipped, it came through the thin wall of the adjoining anteroom.The wall was papered in pale silk, just like the rest of the venue.I knew how thin it was.I’d heard the coordinator’s heels clicking on the other side earlier.Now it carried every word he was saying to where I stood just feet away in my mother’s veil.
I stopped.
“… the cleanest arrangement I’ve brokered in a decade,” he was saying, and his voice carried the warm, lubricated register he used in boardrooms and on golf courses and at the country club bar after his third drink.“No.The initial payment was just the beginning.The other assets transfer at close.The Stewart side handles the rest.We’re talking a clean nine-figure return inside three years if their projections hold, and Grant’s projections always hold.”
A pause.A laugh -- short, two syllables, the kind he gave to other men.
“Of course, she will.She was raised for it.”
I put my hand on the doorframe because my legs had gone strange.
“Listen, Tom, between us -- there were three other families on the short list in ‘21 and the Stewarts were the only ones who came in clean.No leverage on the back end.No clawback clauses.Grant wanted what he wanted and the old man wrote the check.That’s the kind of partner you build a future with.”Another pause.“No, she’s fine.Her mother’s handling it.”
He didn’t say my name.Not once.I was the asset.The transfer.The best deal he’d brokered in a decade.
I let go of the doorframe.
I turned back into the room.
The mirrors caught me again -- all of them, from every angle, the girl in the veil, the gown, the long pale river of lace down her back -- and I made myself walk to the largest of them.I stood in front of it and looked.
I pulled the long lace sleeve of the gown up past my wrist, then my forearm, then my elbow.I held it bunched in my fist and looked at the inside of my upper arm in the mirror, then my gaze went down to my wrist.
The older bruises were green now, going yellow at the edges.There was a darker one higher up, almost to the shoulder, that was still purple in the center.They were spaced like fingers.They had been spaced like fingers when they were fresh, too, three weeks ago, when he’d held me against the wall of his study after a charity dinner because I’d laughed at something the senator from Virginia had said and Grant had not found it funny.
I’d covered them with concealer for nineteen days.I wore long sleeves to brunch with my mother, and she said nothing.To my final dress fitting, where the seamstress simply pinned around them.Last night, my own grandmother patted my cheek and told me wedding nerves were making me look tired.
I let the sleeve drop.
I looked at the girl in the mirror for one more second.I didn’t recognize her, and then I did.The recognition was not the soft, frightened thing it had been an hour ago when my mother was adjusting my veil.It was fear hardened into something sharper.Something I’d always known was there.
I crossed to the closet.
The closet was deep -- built for brides who came with three changes and a going-away dress -- and I’d used that.Behind the long white garment bag that held the reception gown my mother had picked out, on a low hook screwed into the back wall, hung a canvas tote.Brown.Unremarkable.The kind of bag a woman might carry to a farmer’s market.
I’d been packing it for six weeks, a little at a time.
Two hundred dollars in twenties one week, three hundred the next, cash back from errands my mother sent me on or skimmed from the allowance my father still gave me for lunches I never ate.A pair of jeans bought at a discount store in a town twenty minutes north of my parents’ house, paid for in cash, tags removed in the parking lot.A long-sleeved T-shirt.Underwear.A pair of canvas sneakers, size seven, never worn.A toothbrush.Travel-size deodorant.A hairbrush.A folded paper map of Tennessee from a rest stop because I didn’t trust the GPS on the phone they had given me at sixteen.
And the burner.
I’d bought it at a gas station forty minutes from my parents’ house on a Tuesday afternoon in October, after telling my mother I was going to my Pilates class.I’d paid cash.The clerk had not looked at me.I hadn’t turned it on yet.It sat in the bottom of the bag, still in its plastic shell, the charger coiled beside it.
I took it out of the shell.My fingers shook on the plastic and I waited until they stopped, then peeled the rest of it back and held the phone in my palm.It was very small.Black.Cheap.I tucked it down inside the bodice of the gown where the beading was densest, where Grant’s grandmother’s emerald brooch was pinned at the waist, and the boning of the dress held it tight against my ribs.
I looped the tote over one shoulder.
I bent down -- slowly, because the gown didn’t want me to -- and unbuckled the satin strap of one ivory heel, then the other.I stepped out of them and left them lying on their sides in the middle of the bridal suite like two guests who had overstayed their welcome.Digging through my bag, I pulled out the pair of sneakers and slipped them on.
Downstairs, the quartet had stopped playing.Someone -- the coordinator, probably, or one of her assistants -- was making an announcement to the seated guests in the warm, modulated tone of a person preparing two hundred people to stand at the appearance of a bride.
I went to the door, put my hand on it, and listened.
