As soon as they’d been pronounced man and wife, Dad and Charlotte had marched triumphantly back up the aisle, where they’d promptly disappeared. Even now, a full fifteen minutes after they sealed the deal with a kiss, Hadley hasn’t seen any sign of them. She wanders aimlessly through the crowd, wondering how Dad could possibly know this many people. He lived in Connecticut for nearly his whole life and has only a few token friends to show for it. A couple years over here, and he’s apparently some kind of social butterfly.
Besides which, most of the guests look like extras from a movie set, plucked straight out of someone else’s life entirely. Since when does her father hang out with women in fancy hats and men in morning suits, all of them dressed as if they’ve dropped by on their way to tea with the Queen? The whole scene—combined with her mounting jet lag—makes Hadley feel not quite awake, like she’s a beat or two behind the present moment and trying unsuccessfully to catch up.
As a sliver of sun breaks through the clouds, the wedding guests tilt their heads back and lower their umbrellas, marveling as if they’re fortunate enough to be bearing witness to the rarest of weather anomalies. Standing in their midst, Hadley isn’t quite sure what’s required of her at the moment. The other bridesmaids don’t appear to be around, and it’s entirely possible she’s meant to be doing something more useful right now; she didn’t exactly read all of the schedules and directions that had been e-mailed to her over the past few weeks, and there’d been no time to get further instruction before the ceremony.
“Am I supposed to be somewhere?” she asks when she stumbles across Monty, who’s circling the vintage white limousine out front with great interest. He shrugs, then immediately resumes his inspection of the car that will presumably whisk the happy couple off to the reception later.
On her way back toward the church entrance, Hadley is relieved to spot a purple dress in the crowd, which turns out to be Violet.
“Your dad’s looking for you,” Violet says, pointing at the old stone building. “He and Charlotte are inside. She’s just getting her makeup retouched a bit before it’s time for photos.”
“When’s the reception?” Hadley asks, and the way Violet looks at her, it’s as if she’s inquired as to where the sky’s located. Apparently, this is a rather obvious piece of information.
“Did you not get an itinerary?”
“I didn’t get a chance to look at it,” Hadley says sheepishly.
“It’s not till six.”
“So what do we do between now and then?”
“Well, the photos will take a while.”
“And then?”
Violet shrugs. “Everyone’s staying at the hotel.”
Hadley gives her a blank look.
“Which is where the reception is,” she explains. “So I suppose we’ll probably go back there in between.”
“Fun,” Hadley says, and Violet raises an eyebrow.
“Aren’t you going to go find your dad?”
“Right,” she says without moving. “Yup.”
“He’s in the church,” Violet repeats, forming the words slowly, as if worried that her friend’s new stepdaughter might be a few ants shy of a picnic. “Right over there.”
When Hadley still makes no sort of overture to leave, Violet’s face softens.
“Look,” she says, “my father remarried when I was a bit younger than you are. So I get it. But you could do a lot worse than Charlotte as a stepmum, you know?”
In fact, Hadley doesn’t know. She barely knows anything about Charlotte at all, but she doesn’t say this.
Violet frowns. “I thought mine was really awful. I hated her for asking me to do even the smallest things, things my own mum would have made me do, too, like going to church or doing chores around the house. With stuff like that, it’s just a matter of who’s doing the asking, and because it was her, I hated it.” She pauses, smiling. “Then one day, I realized it wasn’t her that I was really angry with. It was him.”
Hadley looks off toward the church for a moment before answering. “Then I guess,” she says finally, “that I’m already a step ahead of you.”
Violet nods, perhaps realizing that there’s not much progress to be made on the subject, and gives Hadley’s shoulder an awkward little pat. As she turns to leave, Hadley is filled with a sudden dread for whatever it is that awaits her inside the church. What exactly are you supposed to say to the father you haven’t seen in ages on the occasion of his wedding to a woman you’ve never met? If there’s an appropriate etiquette for this sort of situation, she’s certainly not familiar with it.
Inside, the church is quiet. Everyone is outside waiting for the bride and groom to emerge. Her heels echo loudly on the tiled floors as she wanders toward the basement, trailing a hand along the rough stone walls. Near the stairs, the sound of voices drifts upward like smoke, and Hadley pauses at the top to listen.
“You don’t mind, then?” a woman asks, and another one murmurs something that’s too soft for Hadley to hear. “I’d think it’d make things tough.”
“Not at all,” says the other woman, and Hadley realizes that it’s Charlotte. “Besides, she lives with her mum.”
From where she’s standing, frozen at the top of the stairs, Hadley catches her breath.
Here it comes, she thinks. The wicked stepmother moment.
Here’s the part where she overhears all the awful things they’ve been saying about her, where she discovers how glad they are that she’s out of the picture, that she’s not wanted anyway. She’s spent so many months imagining this, picturing just how awful Charlotte might be, and now that the moment is finally here, she’s so busy waiting for the proof that she nearly misses the next part.
“I’d like to get to know her better,” Charlotte is saying. “I really do hope they patch things up soon.”
The other woman lets out a soft laugh. “Like in the next nine months?”
“Well…” Charlotte says, and Hadley can hear the smile in her voice. It’s enough to send her backward several steps, stumbling a bit in her too-high heels. The empty halls of the church are dark and silent, and she feels suddenly chilled despite the temperature.
Nine months, she thinks, her eyes pricking with tears.
Her first thought is for her mother, though whether it’s a wish to protect or to be protected, she’s not really sure. Either way, she wants nothing more than to hear her mom’s voice right now. But her phone is downstairs, in the same room as Charlotte, and besides, how could she be the one to break the news? She knows Mom has a tendency to take these things in stride, always as wholly unruffled as Hadley is irrational. But this is different. This is huge. And it seems impossible that even Mom could avoid feeling rattled by this piece of news.