The Bride (The Boss)

by Barnette, Abigail

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Settling into the new house was a welcome distraction from my BFF troubles at first, but by mid-April, the newness had worn off and I was in serious panic mode at not having heard from Holli. When the first week of May rolled around, I was a barely eating insomniac with an incredibly worried boyfriend. It wasn’t an ideal situation, and we were both definitely feeling the stress.

  It didn’t help that the second Saturday of the month was Emma’s wedding. Neil had been doing a great job of filling both the fiancé and best friend roles since we’d moved out of the city, but now, he was tied up in knots of his own over losing his only child to a handsome, well-off young attorney.

  “I think we’ll spend a few days in the apartment,” Neil said, as he checked and rechecked his schedule of wedding events. “I’ve got a final fitting with my tailor on the Thursday before, and the rehearsal dinner is on Friday night. Sunday, we’ll be exhausted, so we may as well stay until Monday.”

  “Ugh. I hate having to pack. It’s going to feel like I’m taking a vacation to my own house.” And, secretly, I didn’t want to go back to the apartment while we were still in the honeymoon period with our new place. The past month had been lots of fun, though Neil hadn’t quite let go of his company yet. He made the commute to the Elwood & Stern offices a couple times a week, either via helicopter or one of his ridiculous cars, the entire collection of which had arrived one at a time from his various storage facilities around the world. I suppose I should have anticipated he’d have some pricey cars, since one of Elwood & Stern’s flagship publications was Auto Watch, but our freaking garage looked like an episode of that weird British motoring show he was always watching.

  But our days had been spent mostly together, lazing around reading, watching TV, cooking for ourselves, cleaning up after ourselves, just being a real couple without the interruptions of adult children, exes, or housekeepers. A team of cleaning staff came in once a week and unobtrusively tidied up, but we hardly ever saw them while they were there. It was amazing how easily you could just not see anyone in such a huge house.

  Neil and I had taken full advantage of our isolation. More than one dinner had been postponed for a hasty fuck up against the refrigerator, and another memorable occasion had seen me lying across Neil’s lap in one of his oxford shirts and nothing else, masturbating myself to orgasm over and over while he calmly read the morning paper and gave the occasional, bored sounding instruction. His feigned disinterest had only ramped up my desire, and we’d ended up fucking on the wide art deco rug on the floor. It was a heady return to the weekends we’d spent together at the beginning of our relationship, and I didn’t want to leave it behind.

  But obligation called us into the city, so we left for Manhattan in the Maybach, the only car we owned that had trunk space. Tony drove us, probably glad to finally earn his keep and feel secure in his job. We’d barely ventured out of the house at all, and his services hadn’t been needed for a while. When I’d asked Tony how he filled his time, he’d replied, “Knitting,” and left it at that.

  He made me an afghan.

  The apartment looked, more or less, exactly as it had when we’d left, though everything that remained was in the b-squad—our sheets, our dishes, whatever furnishings we hadn’t taken with us. In the kitchen, there were squares on the wall that hadn’t faded where pictures of Emma had previously hung. The place was weirdly empty without being empty.

  “Home sweet home?” Neil asked, resigned, as we unpacked our clothes in the bedroom. “The closet looks so…bare.”

  “Wanna see the dress I’m wearing to the wedding?” I asked to cheer him up. “Emma helped me pick it out.”

  I unzipped the garment bag and pulled out the just slightly longer than cocktail length black taffeta with a deep cut, wide lapelled neckline. A sash of matching black taffeta wrapped the waist and tied in a bow at one hip. “Ta-da!”

  He sat in the wing chair and dropped his head to his hands. “I can’t do this.”

  “Well, you don’t have to wear it,” I joked. When he didn’t look up, I felt terrible for making light of his anxiety. Clearly, this was not about the dress. “I have a feeling you’re saying that you can’t ‘do’ your daughter’s wedding.”

  “It’s not the wedding.” He looked up and drew his palms down his face. “It’s the marriage. I can’t watch Emma do this to her life.”

  It took all the will power I had in me to keep my tone gentle, but this “Horrible Michael” shtick was getting tired. “What are you talking about? She loves Michael, and he treats her like she’s a priceless gem or something. You couldn’t have asked for a more perfect son-in-law.”

  “It isn’t Michael.”

  “Then what is it?” I’d been prepared for him to have a total meltdown this week. I wished it could have come slightly earlier, but at least he wasn’t losing his mind two minutes before the ceremony.

  “I just don’t think it’s a good idea for Emma to get married,” he insisted. “Can we please leave it there?”

  “No, we can’t. Your daughter is getting married on Saturday, whether you’re ready for it or not.” I threw my hands up. “Sometimes, I think you see Emma as six years old or something. Is there even one good reason for her to not marry Michael?”

  “I told you, this isn’t about Michael.”

  “Then why are you acting like this?”

  “Because twenty-five is too young to get married, that’s why!” he snapped.

  I stared in horror.

  He looked away. “I didn’t mean… Oh, fuck me, yes, I did.”

  “Shut up.” I leaned back against the full-length mirror and put my head in my hands. “Is that why you’ve been so reluctant to talk about setting a date, or anything to do with our wedding?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “You know what?” I took a deep breath through my nose. My head was spinning, and I was about two seconds from a sobbing, screaming meltdown. But the week was too damn busy. “Your daughter is getting married. Let’s just get through this weekend.”

  “And then…what?” he asked, a tremor of hopelessness in his voice.

  I straightened and pushed my hair back from my forehead. “I don’t know, Neil? Then what? You don’t want to marry me. Fine. But I don’t know what’s going on in your head, and it sounds like it could go either way. We can get an emergency appointment with Ashley for Monday or something, but I can’t do this right now. I don’t want us to come to any sort of final decision that will hurt Emma, especially not when this could all be the stress of the wedding.”

  He went pale, and for an Englishman, that’s a pretty big feat. “You don’t think I meant—”

  “I don’t know what you meant. But I don’t want to know until after this weekend.” I couldn’t sit there and do this. I turned toward the door and, on some mean, self-pitying impulse, said, “I’ll try not to get in too many of the pictures.”

  “Damn it, Sophie!”

  He stormed after me, out of the bedroom and into the foyer, but I didn’t stop. I felt like breaking dishes, so I veered off my course, away from the kitchen, down the hall past the bedrooms, to the storage room.

  “Where are you going?” Neil demanded.

  “I’m getting sheets for the guest room.”

  “Why?”

  “You fucking know why!” I slammed the linen closet open and jerked out a neatly folded set of sheets. “I don’t want to have this fight right now! We’re under a lot of stress and we’re going to hurt each other’s feelings. You just dropped a bomb on me, and I don’t even want to look at you.”

  “This isn’t…” He took a deep breath and lowered his voice. “I meant to address this with you, just not at this time. But this isn’t as much about you as it is about Emma. I chose my words carelessly. If you’d like to see Ashley on Monday, that would be fine. But don’t lets ruin our weekend with all of this.”

  “You just told me you think we shouldn’t get married.” My throat clos
ed up a little saying it.

  His shoulders sagged. “I love you, Sophie. Of course I want to be with you. But there are things we need to… I shouldn’t have brought it up now. I’m sorry. This is an extraordinarily stressful time, and I spoke without thinking. Please…”

  I hugged the bundle of linens to my chest. “Please what?”

  “I don’t know.” His expression was so sad and helpless. “Just…please.”

  “Where is this coming from?” I was afraid to put down the sheets, because then I might fall into his arms and take reassurance from his physical presence, rather than addressing the issue at hand. “I know this isn’t just about Emma’s wedding. What’s happening here?”

  He rubbed a hand over his forehead. “Pre-wedding jitters, I suppose. Pre-pre-wedding jitters?”

  “Look, I’m tired. And stressed. I’m going to go eat a pint of ice cream and go to bed.” I couldn’t believe how hurt I was over this. “I’m going to chalk all of this up to heightened emotions on both of our parts, and we’ll talk about it again when we’re sane.”

  “I think that’s a good idea.” He came forward tentatively, as though rejection were a viper coiled between us and he didn’t know if it would strike. When he got close enough, I tilted my face up to him, and when he kissed me, I felt the tension behind it. “I love you. If you need to sleep in the guest bedroom, I won’t be angry.”

  “I wouldn’t really care if you were.”

  “I know. I didn’t say it to reassure you. I was reassuring myself.”

  He went away then, and I turned to the closet. Neil and I had fought before—it was an inevitability of being with the same person every day—but it had never felt so final. Even when he’d broken up with me in the hospital, when I’d just been fired and he’d been sick with cancer he’d never told me about. Even when I’d told him I was pregnant. Or when I’d found out he’d put me in his will against my wishes. This felt anticlimactic and stagnant.

  This felt like a real problem.

  * * * *

  Emma’s wedding rehearsal was nothing short of torture. The bridesmaids didn’t pay attention. The groomsmen—and the groom—were either severely hung over or still drunk from the bachelor party the night before. Since I wasn’t absolutely necessary to the proceedings, I entertained myself walking around the outdoor terrace and snapping a few pictures with my phone, in case they found the whole evening memorable in hindsight. By the time we left for the rehearsal dinner, Emma and Michael both seemed utterly defeated.

  “That bad, huh?” I asked Neil as our car pulled away.

  “No, not that bad. I’ve been to worse.” He leaned his elbow on the door and ran his knuckles back and forth over his bottom lip. “Everything will be fine. They’re both quite anxious is all.”

  “Yikes.”

  “No, that’s a good thing,” he assured me. “Elizabeth and I weren’t nervous at all at our rehearsal. We were confident and everything went smoothly, right down to the last detail. Never a single doubt in my mind. And look at what happened to the marriage.”

  “That’s a good point.” I leaned my head back and closed my eyes. I really wished we’d be sleeping in our own bed tonight. Our fight from the day before still hung between us, like the final drop of an overturned cup that might spill out or might not. And I had very little indication of the outcome. It seemed like if we were back at the house, we’d be able to return to the contented bliss of the last few weeks.

  I tried to make a joke. “Well, it’s a good thing you’re having so many reservations about our wedding.”

  “Oh, I’m making a list,” he assured me, and though our words mimicked the companionable banter we were used to, it all rang hollow.

  I couldn’t understand why a simple piece of paper worried him so much. Buying a multi-million-dollar house and putting my name on the title? No big commitment. Standing up in front of our family and friends and admitting we loved each other and wanted to spend our lives together? Unthinkable.

  The fact that he thought I was too young, that the age gap I’d thought we’d overcome had resurfaced just when it seemed our relationship was in the clear, made no sense to me. It had come from out of the blue. The fact that we couldn’t fight about it at the moment—no matter how angry I was, I was more concerned about Emma’s big day going smoothly—only made everything worse. I tried to read into his every word and gesture, like I could predict the outcome of whatever argument we’d end up having.

  I didn’t think Neil would actually break up with me, and I was pretty sure I wasn’t hurt or betrayed enough to dump him. I didn’t need to be married. I’d never planned to. It really was an outmoded institution; one that had more to do—in my mind—with tax filing statuses than anything else. But I worried that if we called off our engagement, that would be the beginning of a long, torturous slide to the end.

  What was strange about the whole thing was that, until he’d proposed to me, I would have been perfectly happy to keep going along the way we had been. But his doubt now seemed like a rejection. Or yet another case of him thinking he knew what was best for me, and not including me in decisions about our life.

  The restaurant Emma and Michael had chosen was not the place I would have expected a billionaire’s daughter to have her wedding rehearsal dinner, but it was the place where they’d had their first date. The walls of exposed brick and the hanging light fixtures of opaque amber glass marked it out as a trendy, but relatively inexpensive, place, the kind I would have gathered at with coworkers.

  When the drinks were served and the toasts underway, Michael stood up and thanked everyone for coming. “Maybe I should say that when Emma and I sat at that table, right over there,” he pointed to a corner booth, “I had no idea that this intelligent, beautiful woman would one day be my wife. But I knew. I knew that she was the one.”

  There was a round of “awww!”s from the table. Even Neil looked moved by the sentiment. He might also have just been tired. We’d been out to JFK early that morning to greet his family, his brothers and their wives, his sister, and his mother, Rose, when their private jet had arrived, and we’d spent most of the day with them. It had been lovely to spend time with them and get to know them better, but it had also been exhausting, especially since we’d been maintaining this whole we’re-not-mad-at-each-other facade.

  Michael stopped, choked up with emotion. He laughed and rubbed at an eyebrow with his thumbnail. “Okay, I’m going to stop being sentimental, before she kills me. But I just want to say… Thank you, Ms. Stern and Mr. Elwood, for raising the coolest woman on the planet. When she walks down that aisle tomorrow, I think I’ll have to pinch myself to make sure I’m not dreaming.”

  “When she walks down the aisle?” Rose leaned over to ask Neil in what she considered a whisper. “Aren’t you walking her down the aisle?”

  “No, Mother,” Neil whispered back, hushing her.

  For all the excitement of the evening and the romantic toast, Emma’s eyes were hollows, her smile frozen.

  Michael was still beaming from ear to ear. “I won’t go on longer, but I just want to say, Emma, you have made me so happy. And I know we’re going to continue to be happy as we build our new life together. Cheers.”

  “Cheers.” Neil raised his glass along with everyone, and I saw the tightness in his jaw. This was so hard for him, and I was powerless, because things were so strained between us that I didn’t know what comfort I could offer him without overstepping some line.

  As the wait staff served the salads, Rose spoke up. “What’s this? What’s this nonsense? Neil, you’re not really going to let her do that, are you? A father has to give his daughter away.”

  A hint of a smile crossed Neil’s lips. “I don’t see how it’s my choice, Mother. It’s Emma’s wedding, not mine.”

  “Elizabeth, your father walked you down the aisle, didn’t he? Did you tell Emma?” Rose called to me, pointing a stern finger across Neil’s body.

  “Nana, that’s Sophie. Rememb
er? 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?”