Chapter twenty-two
Tessa
Margaret's dining table has disappeared entirely under an avalanche of cream envelopes, gold-edged invitations, seating chart drafts, and enough wax seal equipment to staff a medieval scriptorium.
I pick up the nearest sheet and squint at a handwritten guest list.
"Eight weeks until the wedding," Margaret announces, pressing both palms flat on the table like she's stabilizing a patient on a gurney. "Which means everything gets decided tonight."
Eleanor is already tearing strips of envelope moisteners with the focused aggression of someone who has not only accepted her fate but has made peace with God about it. Daniel holds up a wax seal stamp and examines it at arm's length, rotating it slowly, the way you'd handle something confiscated from a crime scene.
George settles into the chair beside me. He pulls the nearest stack of envelopes toward himself and reaches for the addresslist like he's been here a hundred times. Something about the ease of it makes me slightly nervous.
I sit down next to him and pick up a pen, and within thirty seconds we've sorted ourselves into a system without exchanging a single word about it. I do the addresses, he seals. It happens like water finding its level. Organic, quiet, slightly too natural for something we've never discussed.
Don't notice that, I tell myself.It's just efficiency. People are efficient. It's not a personality trait, it's a pen.
Margaret is conducting operations from the head of the table, gesturing at seating chart zones with a monogrammed pen like a general with very strong opinions about topography. "The Haverford table cannot be near the Ashby table," she says, with the gravity of someone disarming a bomb in a school.
Daniel leans toward me and whispers, "I thought weddings were supposed to be about love."
"They are," I whisper back. "Unfortunately, families attend them."
George's mouth twitches into almost a smile, though it's smaller and more private, and he doesn't look up from the envelope he's sealing.
Margaret pauses mid-instruction and goes very still, watching George and me move through our envelope assembly line.
"You two work rather well together," she says.
Eleanor's hand shoots into the air like she's been sitting on a spring. "I keep telling you."
I laugh it off and wave my pen in a vague dismissive arc before reaching for the next invitation. Inside, something twists quietly, because she's not wrong, and that's exactly the part I don't know what to do with.
George says nothing. He just passes me the next sealed envelope with quiet precision, and I take it, and we continue.
We do work well together.The thought arrives without knocking and I let it sit there for exactly one second before I walk it firmly to the door. So well, actually, that I'd once let myself forget it was fake. Let myself fall for the architecture of something that had been built specifically to look real.
I wasn't doing that again.
Daniel is now attempting to melt wax over the candle Margaret has provided, holding the stick with the careful optimism of a man who has decided this time will be different, this time physics will cooperate.
"Don't tilt it," Eleanor warns.
He tilts it. A fat red drop lands directly on the back of his hand. "Ouch."
The whole table laughs, and Margaret reaches over and removes the wax set from him without a word, without breaking eye contact with her seating chart, the way you'd confiscate scissors from a toddler mid-sentence.
I'm still smiling when George slides a finished addressed envelope across to my side. I reach for it at the same moment he does, and our fingers land on the same corner of the envelope.
We both let go immediately.
I pick it up and my heart does something embarrassing and I am not acknowledging it, I am acknowledging nothing, I am a woman stuffing envelopes and experiencing zero physiological responses to anything.
George resumes addressing the next one like it didn't happen. I decide this means he didn't notice. I decide this is fine. I decide I believe that completely.
"Aunt Petunia cannot be anywhere near Cousin Mel," Margaret says to the seating chart, making a noise of deep personal suffering. "I need that on record."
"What did Cousin Mel do?" Eleanor asks.
