I turn the page. Me as a baby. Me at three, in the garden, holding a tomato in both hands, my face smeared with dirt. My mother crouching beside me, laughing. My father behind the camera, his shadow visible in the bottom corner.
More pages. Birthday parties. School photos with the bad haircuts and the forced smiles. The summer at the lake with my cousins, all of us sunburned and grinning, popsicle stains on our shirts.
And then, mixed in with the family photos, the other ones. The ones from before.
Me and Sarah Kowalski at junior prom, both of us in dresses we bought at the thrift store on Main Street, both of us convinced we looked like movie stars. Sarah with her red hair and her loud laugh and the way she'd call me at midnight to read me passages from whatever book she was into that week.
Me and Ruby Laiken at graduation, caps crooked, arms around each other's shoulders. Ruby, who sat next to me in biology and taught me how to play chess during lunch and drove me to the hospital the night my mother's breathing changed.
Me and Carly and Jess Navarro at the coffee shop on Fifth, sophomore year of community college. Carly, who was going to be a teacher. Jess, who was going to backpack through South America. Me, who was going to be a nurse.
I haven't talked to any of them in years.
Jason didn't forbid it. That wasn't how Jason worked. He didn't issue orders. He created conditions. A bad mood when I came home from coffee with Sarah. A migraine, conveniently timed, the night Ruby invited me to her birthday. A comment about Carly, nothing cruel, just pointed enough to make me second-guess the friendship.She's kind of needy, don't you think? She calls you a lot. I just want time with you, Sade. Is that so much to ask?
It wasn't much to ask. Each time, it wasn't much. A skipped coffee. A missed birthday. A text left on read because answering would mean explaining why I couldn’t be there.
One by one, the friendships thinned, and one morning I woke up in the apartment in Millbrook and realized I hadn't spoken to a single friend in seven months and the only person who called me was the man lying beside me who had messed with my insulin the night before.
I close the album. I press my palms flat against the cover and I sit with it.
I could call Sarah. I could find her number, or her social media, or just look up Kowalski in Millbrook and there she'd be. I could explain. Not everything, not the insulin or the knife or the blood on the kitchen floor, but enough. Enough to sayI'msorry. I disappeared. I wasn't well. The man I was with made it hard to be anything to anyone else, and I let him, and by the time I realized what I'd lost, it felt too late to come back.
It felt too late. Past tense. Because sitting in this bedroom, with a diamond on my finger and a wedding dress in the guest room closet, it doesn't feel too late anymore. It feels like exactly the kind of thing a woman does when she's starting over. You open the boxes. You look at the photos. And you decide which parts of the life you packed away are worth unpacking.
I put the album on the nightstand and walk down the hall to the guest room.
The dress is hanging over the closet. I know this because I've opened the garment bag four times today. I told myself I was checking on it, making sure it was hanging properly, making sure the bag was zipped, making sure nothing had happened to it in the three hours since I last checked. This is ridiculous. Nothing is going to happen to a dress in a zipped bag in a closed closet in a guarded house.
I know this, but I can’t stop myself.
I unzip it three inches, just enough to see the fabric.
Ivory. Silk. A simple cut, fitted through the bodice, a skirt that falls straight to the floor without volume or fuss. Priya found it at a boutique in Wicker Park, a tiny shop run by a woman named Gemma who took one look at me and said, "You want something clean," and she pulled this off the rack. Priya cried when I tried it on, and that was the end of the search.
I zip the bag closed. I press my hand against it for a moment. Then I close the closet.
The sadness is there. It's been there all day, running underneath the excitement like a bass note under a melody, low and steady. I'm getting married in six days and my mother won'tzip me into my dress and my father won't offer me his arm. There will be no family in the front pew, just a space where they should be, and the space will be the loudest thing in the church.
But the sadness isn't all there is. Underneath it, or maybe beside it, is something else. Something warm and stubborn and forward-facing. The feeling of a woman who packed her life into boxes and opened them in a new house and found that the things inside them still fit, just in different places now.
I go looking for Nick.
He's in the study. The door is open three inches, which means he's working but not on anything that requires privacy. I've learned the language of this house in the weeks I've lived here. Closed door means Dmitri is inside and the conversation isn't for me. Closed door but multiple voices means captains. Open door means come in. Three inches means knock.
I knock.
"Come in."
He's behind the desk. Sleeves rolled to the elbow, pen in hand, a folder open in front of him. The lamp is on, throwing that warm circle across the desktop that I've come to associate with him the way I associate the smell of antiseptic with the clinic. He looks up and his face does the thing it does when he sees me, the slight recalibration, the sharpening of focus, as if everything else in his field of vision just dropped a level in priority.
"Hey," I say, closing the door behind me.
"Hey." He sets the pen down. "How’s the unpacking going?"
"Fine," but the twist in my chest tells me that it’s not so fine on a deeper level.
He watches my face. "Come here."
