"What colour, then?"
I think about the fields. I think about the little unframed canvas above our bed, of two pairs of hands.
"Purple," I say.
She comes back two days later with it, and I don't say anything for quite a while — because it's deep lavender silk, and there are stalks embroidered along the hem in a thread one shade darker, and it is the loveliest thing I have ever put on my body.
"Well?" says Sophie.
"How much do I owe you."
"Nothing."
"Sophie—"
"Cat." She adjusts my shoulder seam with two brisk fingers and does not look at my face. "Don't be tiresome."
Iris's is ivory. Straight, plain, entirely unfussy. When she comes out of the fitting room in it, I have to sit down on a chair.
"That bad?" she says.
"Shut up," I tell her. "Shut up."
The package arrives three days before the wedding.
I'm in the kitchen arguing with Mathilde about the fish course again when Iris appears in the doorway wearing a face I have never seen on her.
"You need to come."
It's on the desk in the office. Large, flat, wrapped in brown paper, with a Chicago return address in handwriting we both recognise.
We stand and look at it.
"Do you want me to open it?" I ask.
"No." Iris doesn't move. "What if it's something horrible?"
"Then we burn it and never speak of it again."
She almost laughs. Then she reaches out and takes the paper off, very carefully, the way she does everything.
It's a painting.
Marguerite — young. Thirty, perhaps. Standing in the fields with the sun behind her, her face turned slightly away, looking at something outside the frame. And whatever she's looking at has done something to her face that I have never seen in a single photograph of her.
We both know exactly who was holding the brush.
There's a note taped to the back.
Iris—
Your grandmother sent me this in 1996, the year after I took you home. There was a letter with it. I never read the letter and I never opened the crate.
It has sat in a storage unit outside Chicago for twenty-nine years. I have paid the bill on it every month for twenty-nine years. I have never once been able to explain to myself why.
I opened it last week.
I am not coming to the wedding. I would rather be honest with you than kind: I am not ready, and I would come and spoil it, and I think we both know that I would.
