Chapter six
Tessa
Asaleswoman glides toward me the moment I step through the door, moving with the calm of someone who has personally prevented at least three mothers-of-the-bride from staging emotional collapses before lunch.
"Welcome. Are you here with a party?"
“The Maddox bridal appointment,” I say, and recognition flickers across her face so quickly it feels rehearsed. She turns at once with a murmured of course and leads me through a forest of ivory and blush, past beaded sleeves, satin trains, and enough tulle to smother a small village, toward a low velvet seating area at the back of the boutique.
I smell the champagne before I see the group, something dry and faintly floral cutting through the heavier boutique air of pressed fabric, cedar hangers, and expensive hopes. A cluster of women stand gathered around a tall mirror and a rolling rack of gowns, and every single head turns toward me in perfect, terrible unison when the saleswoman gestures and announces, “The Maddox party.”
For one brief second, I consider pretending I took a wrong turn and wandered in here by accident.
Then the tallest woman steps forward—dark hair swept back, coral lipstick, bright curious eyes that take me in with undisguised interest—and says, "Yes?"
"Hi." I produce what I hope passes for a normal smile and not the expression of a woman actively panicking in tasteful shoes. "I'm Tessa. George's girlfriend."
She blinks once. Then again. Something sharp and delighted clicks into place behind her eyes.
"Wait," she says slowly. "Tessa. From ERS?"
The older woman beside her—elegant, composed, with George's exact grey eyes set in a face that has clearly never entertained a careless thought—looks sharply between us. My stomach performs a small, unhelpful freefall.
"Yes," I say.
There's a short silence while the room rearranges itself around this new information.
Then Eleanor's face lights up like someone threw a switch, warm, sudden and genuinely delighted. "Oh my goodness," she says. "George and Tessa."
I open my mouth to clarify approximately seven things simultaneously and produce, instead, a sound not unlike a small animal meeting an unfortunate end. It escapes before I can stop it. Nothing in my professional life has prepared me for this.
Eleanor waves a hand as though the noise was perfectly reasonable. "That explains all the secrecy," she says, already delighted with herself. "Office romance."
Apparently this tidy explanation satisfies everyone in the room except me, which seems deeply unfair.
“Well,” Eleanor continues, looping her arm through mine with the easy confidence of someone who has already decided we likeeach other, “now that we’ve solved that mystery, welcome to dress shopping.”
She turns us both toward the elegant woman with George’s eyes. “This is Margaret, my mum. Mother, this is Tessa.”
Margaret Maddox extends her hand and shakes mine with a firmness that says she forms opinions quickly, keeps most of them to herself, and misses very little.
Her gaze makes me feel faintly transparent, as though she has already flipped to the back of the book and is now deciding whether the middle is worth her time.
"George speaks very highly of you," she says, which could be a compliment or an opening move in a longer game, and I genuinely cannot tell which.
I say something gracious in return, or at least something arranged in the shape of graciousness, and feel the word girlfriend sitting in my mouth like a smooth stone I could very easily inhale by mistake.
Then a glass of champagne appears at my elbow. Eleanor’s best friend Beth, already glowing with what I suspect is not her first round, offers it to me with a wink. This is a woman who understands emergency social intervention when she sees it.
I take it with more gratitude than I can politely show. My shoulders loosen by perhaps half an inch, which is all the relief my body is willing to risk in public.
The first dress arrives on a rolling rack—an architectural column of ivory mikado that commands the room immediately—and the entire group's attention pivots toward it like a compass finding north. Eleanor follows it into the dressing room with barely suppressed excitement, and I sip my champagne and try to look like someone who belongs here.
Margaret settles beside me and asks, with the polished neutrality of someone who is not neutral in the slightest, whether things between George and me are serious. I open mymouth, discover I have absolutely no usable response prepared for this category of inquiry, and close it again.
Fortunately, Eleanor steps out of the dressing room at exactly that moment, and the room answers with one collective intake of breath that rescues me completely. The dress is beautiful, all clean lines and sculptural confidence, but Eleanor is already frowning at the mirror.
"The bodice is doing something strange when I move," she says, twisting at the waist.
