The dress is a sarcophagus. Thirty-four small satin buttons run down my spine. My mother buttoned them this morning. She cried, doing it, and I told her to stop because she would ruin her mascara, and if I think about her face now I will not get through this.
I have tried twice. Once with my arm cranked behind me like a flamingo, once face-down on the bed. The whalebones dig into my ribs every time I breathe, which serves me right.
I put my palm against my sternum and push, because pushing is the only thing keeping it from climbing up my throat.
My phone buzzes against the laminate and my whole body jolts toward it, the first time I have admitted I am hoping it is him. Something under my ribs folds when I read the screen. Gemma. Not him.
"It's live," she says before I can say hello. "Eight minutes ago, Ode, and I need you to tell me right now if you want me to kill it, even though it’s late, but I’ll do my best—"
"No." It comes out flat, in the voice I found in the bridal suite.
"Odette, one phone call—"
"No, Gemma." I dig my nails into my palms until the skin gives, because it is easier to count pain than breath.
A pause. A newsroom behind her, somebody laughing at something that isn't me. "Okay. It's in the wild." Her exhale is longer than the word. "Where are you."
"Safe." I say curtly, because it’s the only thing I can say right now—my location and solitude is the only thing fully under my control right now.
"Not an answer, babe." Her voice is gentle and apologetic, as if it’s her fault.
"It's the one I have." I do not give her more, because any better answer is a door, and if I open one tonight I will open all of them. "Tell me about the story."
A beat. "Fine. Tier-one outlets picked it up inside the hour. There is already a meme, I am not sending it to you."
"Send it." I try to smile, but it’s feeble and wet and I can’t in good faith count it as a smile.
"No. Not while your hair is still in wedding pins."
“It’s not,” I counter, although it absolutely is. I drop my forehead against the cold of the headboard. If I stay bent long enough my own weight will hold me down, and being held down is close enough to being held.
A child is crying two rooms over and its mother is crying quieter, and a small animal sound comes out of me that I bite back in time in sheer stubbornness. "What's the share price doing?"
"Dropping. When did you last eat." Damn, she’s stubborn too. I hate it as much as I love it in her, but it’s annoying now.
"At the rehearsal dinner." I say it, and it all comes back, his palm at the base of my spine, his thumb doing that slow circle on the silk, the toast about how I was the best thing that ever happened to him.
Which he could say because he knew he had three hours before it stopped being true. I take the phone off my ear because my throat has a shape in it that is not mine. "Oh, Ode."
"Don't. Stay on the story." I redirect her back from my tragedy to my revenge. It should feel better. It barely does.
"All right. Archer and Cole have convened an emergency call. Statement drops before breakfast. He's gone by lunch." Gone by lunch. The words taste like the metal that has not left since the bridal suite, and I reach for my notebook.
Reasons This Was Right.
The pen moves faster than I do. The tattoo. The timestamp, three fourteen, while I was writing him a note in purple pen, while I was kissing the mark on his deltoid I could draw blind.
The twelve months of seating charts. The four times he swore on his mother's memory. I write faster than I need to, because if I stop I will dial his number and hear his voice and believe anything he tells me, and that is the woman I am not allowed to be.
Gemma calls back at two with news—”Trending nationally”—then at four—”Our servers crashed. In a good way, if there is one.”
Between calls the room gets quieter than I can survive, and I put the television on with the sound off, and two women in pink blazers sell me the same knife over and over.
Gemma calls at six-thirty, and her voice has gone the quiet it only goes when she does not want to be right. "Ode. They fired him. No severance, no hearing."
For one clean, terrible second, something in me opens like a door I didn't know I had, warm, hot, whole, and I understand why men start wars. Then the door closes, and behind it is a room I cannot look at yet.
"Thank you," I say, like a person at a counter, and I hang up before she can ask if I am all right, because the answer is a no that I want to hide so far away it seems more like burial.
I walk to the bathroom in wedding shoes still on my feet, and in the mirror there is a bride looking back at me who already knows.
I get the first six buttons off with my teeth. The rest I tear. Seed pearls scatter across the linoleum into the gap beside the toilet where, statistically, they will outlive me.
I am crying now, properly, and I did not know I had started. It is not sound. It is just water, the kind of crying a body does when the woman inside it has stepped out for a minute.
I step out of the dress and put it in the bin. It does not fit, so I push it down and stand with my forehead on the plastic until the shaking in my legs comes back under the negotiable level.
The notebook is still open on the bed.
Things I've Lost.
Liam. Liam in the morning. Liam's hand at the base of my spine. The flat. The job I left for his schedule. The ring. The name I was going to take.
My mother's face, which I cannot look at. My father, who will ask, very gently, if I am sure.
The woman I was at eight o'clock two days ago, who kissed the mark on his deltoid and believed.
My phone lights up. Mum. If I answer I will hear her say my name and I will come apart in a roadside hotel in front of no one. I watch it ring out.
My phone lights up. Celine. She will try to be good for me, and being good for me right now is a knife I cannot hold the handle of. I watch it ring out.
My phone lights up. Celine. Again. I hold the phone until my palm is numb, my own face half-erased in the glass.
I open the laptop, and it asks for my password, and for four seconds I cannot remember it, which is the most honest my night has been.
Coastal towns. Far from London. Long-term room to rent. Cash preferred.
I scroll past Cornwall, because his family has a place there. I want a town that has never heard of me.
Third page. A listing with two photographs, a harbour, a pub sign. Single room, cash accepted, no questions asked.
The town is called Harrowcliff. I have never heard of it, which is, at six forty-one in the morning, the most beautiful sentence I have ever read.
I hover over the booking button. My finger shakes, and it is not the shaking of cold. I press it.
The confirmation loads, and under the landlord's name, in small italics, sits a line I have to read three times before I understand it.
Run by Callum Ware. Tell him what you like.