Chapter 1 - The Bottle Above My Head
The white liquid hit my hair first.
It slipped through the little pearl pins my mother had fastened there that morning, then spread across the lace neckline of the wedding dress seventeen women had spent eleven weeks making for me. My sister stood at my right shoulder with a squeeze bottle tipped upside down and the bright, delighted smile she used whenever a photographer called her name.
“Hold still, Mara,” Sloane said. “You’ll only make it worse.”
I could hear the adhesive landing on silk. A tacky little patter. Then my maid of honor said, “Oh, my God,” and someone dropped a lipstick onto the marble floor.
In the vanity mirror, my mother's mouth opened, but no sound came out.
“Why?” I asked.
Sloane shook the last thick ribbon from the bottle. “Because you won't listen.”
The bottle was labeled FABRIC BONDING COMPOUND in black letters. It wasn't hair product, and it wasn't a prank. I knew exactly what it would do once it dried: stiffen the handworked lace, yellow the silk, and lock the pearl thread into ugly little ridges. My sister knew, too. She owned a bridal business. She had bought this adhesive herself.
Lena, my maid of honor, reached for a towel.
“Don't rub it,” I told her. My voice surprised me. It sounded like somebody speaking from another room. “You'll push it into the stitching.”
Sloane laughed. “Listen to her. The world's ending and she's still giving sewing lessons.”
My mother moved toward me. “Sweetheart—”
“Don't.” I held up one sticky hand. “You saw her do it.”
There it was: the moment I had spent most of my life avoiding. My mother looked at Sloane, then at me, and chose silence because silence had always been cheaper than a fight with her oldest daughter.
Sloane set the empty bottle beside my bouquet. “You've got forty minutes. Put on the VowHouse dress. The photographer can crop out your little disaster.”
The replacement gown waited inside a garment bag bearing Sloane's company's gold logo. I had told her three times I wouldn't wear it. Her new collection featured a lace pattern remarkably like the one on the gown I had designed with the women at the Blue Thread workshop. Yesterday she had called the resemblance a coincidence. This morning she had come prepared with a spare dress in my size.
“That's what this is about?” Lena asked. “A photograph?”
“It's about loyalty,” Sloane said. “Mara won't support the business Mom and I built.”
I looked down at the dress. Along the inside of the train, seventeen names had been stitched in blue, each one the woman who had contributed a piece of the work. The first was Odessa Price, who had taught me to sew a straight seam when I was eleven. The last was Kiki Jordan, the workshop's youngest apprentice. They weren't hidden signatures. They were supposed to be visible when I lifted the train for the photographs.
“Those women made this,” I said.
Sloane's smile tightened. “They already signed their work away.”
I looked up. “What did you say?”
For the first time, she studied the open bridal-suite door instead of my reflection.
“Put on the other dress,” she said. “We're not having this conversation today.”
And that was the instant I understood the bottle hadn't been an impulsive act of jealousy. It was a desperate attempt to keep me from walking into the ballroom wearing something she claimed to own.
Three months earlier, I had agreed to let Sloane arrange the venue in exchange for a modest wedding I could actually afford. I was thirty-three, an alterations specialist who earned my living repairing other people's important clothes. Eli and I had saved for a ceremony at the little church near our apartment. Then my mother had suffered a fall, the family bridal shop had fallen behind on rent, and Sloane offered to host the wedding at the hotel where she was launching a national partnership. She said the free venue would take one worry off my plate.
She never offered anything without deciding later what it had cost her.
I touched a dry section of the train and found the names still intact. “Lena, take a picture of the bottle and the dress. Don't post anything. Just save it.”
Sloane stepped between Lena and the vanity. “You're not turning my sister's wedding into a police report.”
“Then get out of the way,” Lena said.
The two of them had known each other since high school. Lena had once covered for Sloane after she dented my first car. She wasn't covering for her anymore.
My phone buzzed on the counter. ELI: The officiant is here. Are you okay? I can come upstairs.
I started to type. My hands were shaking enough to hit the wrong letters.
Sloane leaned close. “Don't bring him up here. You know how he gets when he thinks somebody's hurt you.”
Eli Turner had a broad, weathered face, a square jaw, and the steady hands of a paramedic who knew that panic rarely helped anybody. He had once broken a man's nose while stopping an assault outside a restaurant, and he had spent more time worrying about whether he could have avoided that punch than boasting about throwing it. Sloane knew the story because she liked retelling it as if it made him dangerous.
“He's my fiancé,” I said. “You don't get to decide what I tell him.”
“Fine. Tell him. Cancel everything. Let all those people go home.” She glanced toward the door again. “But keep in mind what happens to Blue Thread if this turns into a scandal.”
My mother suddenly looked ill. She gripped the edge of the vanity. “Sloane. That's enough.”
“Why?” I asked. “What happens to Blue Thread?”
Neither of them answered.
I wasn't going to tear the dress off and trade it for my sister's advertisement. But I couldn't stand there dripping adhesive forever. Odessa had taught me that when a seam split, you secured the fabric around it before you pulled a single thread. First, keep the damage from spreading. Then find out what caused it.
“Lena,” I said, “find a clean sheet. Mom, get the bottle into a bag. And Sloane, if you want to stay, tell me what you meant.”
Sloane's phone lit up. I caught only the first line before she turned it facedown: WYNN RETAIL / LICENSE PAYMENT CONFIRMED.
A second notification appeared above it.
SEVENTEEN RELEASES REQUIRED. TWO STILL OUTSTANDING.
The room went so quiet I heard the ballroom orchestra warming up through the floor.
May you like
There were seventeen names inside my train. Two women hadn't signed whatever my sister had sold.
And I knew, with a sudden certainty that made my stomach tighten, that one of them was me.
