Chapter 2 - Tell Him He Was Dancing
I didn't wait for her to answer. I couldn't stand there another second with the music pressing on my ribs and everybody smiling like nothing was wrong.
She kept her hand out between us, palm up, fingers trembling a little under the chandelier light. I looked at it because I didn't want to look at her face. Her shimmering sleeve caught the light every time she breathed. For a second I thought if I put my hand in hers, it would be over. She would walk me somewhere quiet and find Mason and let the men handle it.
"You don't have to do this here," she whispered.
I shook my head. My throat was too tight to make a full sentence work. I touched my chest, just below my collarbone, where my breath kept catching. My ring turned cold against my skin. The baby shifted low, a slow roll that made me press my other hand to my belly without thinking.
Behind her shoulder, past the edge of the crowd, I could see him.
Mason was still dancing.
He was out of focus, the way everything past ten feet went soft in that room, but I knew the cut of his tux and the way he held his shoulders when he was performing for people. One hand on her back. The other holding her hand out to the side. He was smiling down at whoever she was in the dark blue dress. The band kept playing and the lights kept moving across the marble columns, and he didn't look over once.
My mother-in-law — I couldn't even say her name in my head right then — followed my eyes. Then she looked back at me, and her hand dropped an inch.
"Emily," she said. "Please."
That was all. Not the rest of it. Just my name, like she was trying to hold me in place with it.
A server moved past us with a tray of champagne, and the breeze from his jacket brushed my bare shoulder. I shivered. My gown felt too light suddenly, too open. I wanted something with sleeves. I wanted a coat. I wanted walls.
I glanced left. Past the last table, past the marble column wrapped in soft uplighting, there was a break in the crowd where the hallway started. No rope. No sign. Just dimmer light and quiet carpet and no music bleeding quite so loud. The side hallway the staff used to slip in and out.
I started walking before I told my legs to move.
"Emily," she said again, behind me.
I didn't stop, but I slowed. I couldn't leave her standing there with her hand in the air. I turned just enough to see her. She was still where I'd left her, her extended hand hanging now at her side, fingers curled in like she didn't know what to do with them. She looked down at them, then up at me, and her mouth pressed into a thin line.
I mouthed, I'm okay. It was a lie and we both knew it, but it was the only thing I could give her without crying out loud.
She nodded once, a tiny movement. She didn't call out. She didn't follow. She just stood there between me and the dance floor, like she was deciding whether to block the view for me.
The hallway air hit cooler on my face. The carpet swallowed my heels. The chandelier glare faded behind me, replaced by low sconces along cream walls and the dark veins in the marble columns up close. I could still hear the bass from the ballroom, thump-thump under the floor, and glasses clinking and somebody laughing too loud near the bar.
I kept one hand on my belly as I walked. The baby moved again, harder this time, a foot or elbow pressing out against my palm. I stopped beside the second column and leaned my shoulder against it. The stone was cold through my dress.
I looked back one last time.
From the corridor mouth, the ballroom was a bright, blurred box. Gold light. Moving shapes. Mason still in the middle of it, turning slowly with the music, his partner's skirt flaring. My mother-in-law was watching me from the edge of the light, her hands now clasped in front of her dress. She didn't wave me back. She didn't go get him.
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For a moment it was just the three of us, held that way — him dancing, her watching, me already gone.
Then a couple turned into the hallway laughing, and I pushed off the column and walked deeper toward the dark, where no one would look for me yet.
