Margaret is standing at the hallway entrance in a pale grey dress, watching me with the calm, unhurried attention of someone who has absolutely nowhere else to be and no intention of pretending otherwise.
"I just needed some air," I say, which is true and also entirely beside the point.
She doesn't argue. She just holds her position in the doorway a beat, and I have the distinct impression that she has outwaited more stubborn people than me.
"George keeps his worlds very separate," she says, conversationally, as though we had already been in the middle of this conversation and I simply hadn't been there for the beginning.
I don't know what to do with that sentence, so I say nothing. She seems to accept this as a reasonable response.
"Family here, work there, everything filed in its correct place." She says it almost to herself, like she's reading from a document she has been studying for years. "You're the first person he's ever let cross that line."
My breath catches.
"He told me about you before you arrived at that first dress appointment," she adds. "George does not usually tell me about work."
I look at her. She looks back at me, steady and unhurried, and I understand that she is not saying this to be kind. She's saying it because it is simply, plainly true, and she sees no reason not to hand it to me.
"He doesn't let many people matter to him," she says. "And when he does, it tends to be permanent."
She reaches over and squeezes my hand once. Then she turns and walks back toward the noise and the flowers and the music beginning to drift from the reception hall.
I stand alone in the hallway with my clutch and the open door and the afternoon light spilling gold across the floor at my feet.
I look at the exit.
Then I look back toward the noise, the complicated and unfinished thing waiting for me somewhere in that room, standing very still and not looking at the door.
It might be too late, I think.
But I am not walking away again.
