The Bride (The Boss) (41 page)

When the drinks were served and the toasts underway, Michael stood up and thanked everyone for coming. “Maybe I should say that when Emma and I sat at that table, right over there,” he pointed to a corner booth, “I had no idea that this intelligent, beautiful woman would one day be my wife. But I knew. I knew that she was the one.”

There was a round of “awww!”s from the table. Even Neil looked moved by the sentiment. He might also have just been tired. We’d been out to JFK early that morning to greet his family, his brothers and their wives, his sister, and his mother, Rose, when their private jet had arrived, and we’d spent most of the day with them. It had been lovely to spend time with them and get to know them better, but it had also been exhausting, especially since we’d been maintaining this whole we’re-not-mad-at-each-other facade.

Michael stopped, choked up with emotion. He laughed and rubbed at an eyebrow with his thumbnail. “Okay, I’m going to stop being sentimental, before she kills me. But I just want to say… Thank you, Ms. Stern and Mr. Elwood, for raising the coolest woman on the planet. When she walks down that aisle tomorrow, I think I’ll have to pinch myself to make sure I’m not dreaming.”

“When
she
walks down the aisle?” Rose leaned over to ask Neil in what she considered a whisper. “Aren’t you walking her down the aisle?”

“No, Mother,” Neil whispered back, hushing her.

For all the excitement of the evening and the romantic toast, Emma’s eyes were hollows, her smile frozen.

Michael was still beaming from ear to ear. “I won’t go on longer, but I just want to say, Emma, you have made me so happy. And I know we’re going to continue to be happy as we build our new life together. Cheers.”

“Cheers.” Neil raised his glass along with everyone, and I saw the tightness in his jaw. This was so hard for him, and I was powerless, because things were so strained between us that I didn’t know what comfort I could offer him without overstepping some line.

As the wait staff served the salads, Rose spoke up. “What’s this? What’s this nonsense? Neil, you’re not really going to let her do that, are you? A father has to give his daughter away.”

A hint of a smile crossed Neil’s lips. “I don’t see how it’s my choice, Mother. It’s Emma’s wedding, not mine.”

“Elizabeth, your father walked you down the aisle, didn’t he? Did you tell Emma?” Rose called to me, pointing a stern finger across Neil’s body.

“Nana, that’s Sophie. Remember? The divorce?” Emma leaned across the table to remind Rose in a low, gentle tone.

“Oh, yes, yes.” Rose waved her hand and laughed. “Do forgive me, Sophie.”

“Forgiven.” There was no way I could hold a slip of the tongue against a woman who’d had a very serious stroke only a year and a half ago.

It hadn’t worn down her tenacity any. “Now, now, I’m serious, little bird. Doesn’t it upset you that you won’t be giving Emma away?”

Neil wiped his mouth on his napkin, chuckling. “Mother, how can I give her away? She’s never really belonged to me. She has been her own person since the day she was born.”

I looked at Emma. Normally, this kind of praise from her father would have pleased her immensely. But she just gave a tight smile to everyone and looked down at her plate.

“I think it’s wonderful.” It was Pamela, Valerie’s best friend since college and one of Emma’s godmothers, who’d made the remark in gentle support. Pamela was exactly what I’d imagine a friend of Valerie’s to be: beautiful, slender, smartly dressed, with a voice like it had been soaked in whiskey and dried with cigarettes. Her ginger hair was pulled up in a perfect twist frozen with industrial strength hairspray. The elegant way she carried herself made her black, ribbed turtleneck seem more fancy than casual. She had a wonderfully posh accent, not unlike Neil’s.

She went on, “You know, I’ve always thought the idea of ‘giving away the bride’ was a bit absurd. Who owns her, then? Michael? Good luck to you.”

We laughed at that, even Emma.

“Sophie, are you going to have someone give you away?” Valerie asked, fixing me with an expectant look.

Neil’s family went silent.

Oh fuck, he hadn’t told them.

“What’s this?” Rose piped up. “Neil, are you getting married again?”

Yeah, Neil. Are you?
My face got hot.

“Tonight isn’t about us,” Neil covered smoothly. “It’s about Emma and Michael.”

But Rose was tenacious. “Of course it’s about Emma and Michael, but right now I’m asking
you
. Are you and Sophie getting married?”

“Sophie and I are engaged.” Still not an answer to
my
question, but I would rather choke on something sharp than admit we were having troubles in front of Valerie.

Neil accepted the congratulations of his brothers, and their wives cooed over my ring, and all the while I wanted to sink to the floor and never have to make eye contact with any of them again. It was a relief when my phone rang.

“I have to take this,” I lied. It was my mother, and I didn’t have the strength to talk to her right now. But she’d provided me an out, bless her.

“The reception in here is awful,” Michael called after me.

I raised my phone as if in another toast. “I will try the street.”

When I exited the dining room, I made a sharp left and headed for the bathroom. I needed to sit and carefully dab at my eyeliner and practice my ecstatic-twenty-five-year-old-fiancé-of-a-billionaire face. It was going to take a lot of work, in the mental state I was in.

The bathroom was brick-tiled, the walls cream stucco. Maybe it was supposed to make patrons feel like they were whizzing in Tuscany. The bathroom stalls were standard, though, and there wasn’t an attendant, so I didn’t feel bad about slipping into one of the cubicles, barring the door, and leaning against the wall for as tearless a cry as I could manage.

I remembered the conversation Holli and I’d had after we’d shared news of our engagements. That seemed a lifetime ago. Time passed oddly without my best friend. And I’d sacrificed her for what? For a man I loved, but who possibly was done with me?

I pulled up the browser on my phone and, with shaking thumbs, entered, “signs not get married” into the search bar. There, three links down, was the article I’d forced myself to not look at that day.

Without really knowing what my expectation was, I found myself relieved when the first items had to do with unfaithfulness, substance abuse, and differing religions. Neil had never, to my knowledge, cheated on me; our fairly open relationship should have meant he never had to go behind my back in the first place. We both kind of abused substances, like when we drank or smoked the occasional J, but it didn’t seem like a problem to us, and it had certainly never caused problems between us. As for religion, maybe his Protestant upbringing against my Catholic one would have been an issue if either of us hadn’t been atheists, but there we were.

The rest of entries in the list were things like, “You fight constantly,” and “He tries to control you.” While Neil was awfully bossy in the bedroom, he wasn’t consistently so outside of it. If anything, his lack of input was more frustrating than any need for control he might have had. Sometimes, I just wanted him to be the proverbial coin flip when it came down my life decisions, and he was maddeningly neutral until pressed. Other times, he couldn’t resist micromanaging our lives, but he never told me what to wear or eat.

Although he did have an annoying habit of trying to decide what was best for me when he thought he was ruining my life.

I saw nothing on the list that would make me hesitate to marry him. But there must have been something about me that had changed his mind.

The bathroom door opened, and I hurried to turn off my phone, like I’d been caught committing a crime.

Pamela’s voice drifted into the echoey room. “I can’t believe he has the nerve to bring her,” she said, and there was a laugh. A laugh I recognized.

Valerie.

“I know. It’s so pathetic,” she said with a resigned sigh. “But that’s Neil for you. The man’s arrogance knows no bounds.”

“It’s Emma I feel badly for, poor dove,” Pamela replied, just as I, quietly as possible, put one foot, then the other, on the toilet seat to hide my feet below the gap in the stall. “Imagine how awful that must be for her? To have her father’s practically teenage mistress at her wedding?”

“I know, I know.” Valerie sounded like she was consoling Emma, despite the fact that she wasn’t there. “She handles it well, but she is so uncomfortable with them. Apparently, they go at it like rabbits. Emma was afraid to move from room to room when she was still living with them.”

I peeked over the top of the door and caught a quick glimpse of Valerie applying lipstick in the mirror.

This was just like a teen movie. And I was the lovable nerd hiding in the bathroom stall while the popular girls bitched about me.

Well, apparently not too lovable, listening to them.

“He’s making a fool of himself,” Pamela went on. “Why do men always do this in middle age?”

“This is Neil we’re talking about. He started going through his midlife crisis the moment Emma was born,” Valerie snarked. “I’m sure this one will be the same as last time. Her biological clock will start making unreasonable demands, he’ll panic, and she’ll be gone.”

My anger boiled up inside me like some horrible, hot, nasty thing. I wanted to storm out and punch her, and I was pretty sure that the only thing holding me back was that Emma wouldn’t want her mother to have a black eye in the wedding photos.

“If she’s anything like the last one, the wedding alone will be an expensive lesson to learn,” Pamela mused.

“Oh, no. I don’t think the wedding is going to happen.” Pride dripped from Valerie’s voice. “I’ve been…gently steering him in the wise direction. ‘She’s so young, you two must have so much in common to overcome that,’ ‘it’s amazing you can keep up with her,’ that type of thing.”

“You can’t tell them anything directly, can you?” Pamela clucked her tongue as though they were talking about a naughty child and not a grown man.

“No, you really can’t. Especially Neil. He just doesn’t listen. I tried to warn him about the last one, and look where that ended up.”

“Hopefully, this one doesn’t take him for as much alimony,” Pamela snorted. “I’m going to the alley for a cigarette. Are you coming?”

“No, I’ll be along in a minute, I should get back out there. I just need the toilet.”
 

When I heard Pamela leave, I stomped down from the toilet seat and flung open the stall door.

For a second, I worried Valerie might have a heart attack, and not in a metaphorical sense. Her eyes flew open, her face went pale—I swear, if she hadn’t been wearing coral lipstick, her lips would have been blue—and her body jolted. Maybe it was because she was shocked at being caught. Maybe it was just the loud noise of the door banging on its hinges and ricocheting back into the latch, which was, admittedly, alarming. But she took a step back, so I knew I did not look happy.

When I spoke, it sounded like some inhuman being had inhabited me. Having been raised extremely Catholic, I did worry for a moment that I might have been possessed, but I think the only thing truly controlling me was my incredible willpower to not knock her down and jam my Stuart Weitzman pump down her throat. “Let me be clear. There are two reasons,
two reasons,
I am not resorting to physical violence right now, and those are that Emma wouldn’t want your hair to be all ripped out in the wedding pictures, and I don’t think you’re worth a night in jail.”

“How dare—” she tried, but I was on a roll.

“I am not finished speaking!” I nearly shouted, but I didn’t want anyone to overhear. I wanted to have this moment uninterrupted, because I didn’t want anything misconstrued. I didn’t want Valerie to think she had an inch of wiggle room, or a drop of sympathy from anyone for the shit she’d been pulling.

I lowered my voice to a deadly whisper, and the ice in my tone matched the ice in my veins. “I am tolerating you right now for Emma’s sake, and for Neil’s sake, but I don’t have to tolerate being spoken of in that way. I let it go when I heard you trying to get Neil to dump me the very first time you met me. But this is getting fucking ridiculous!”

Valerie’s neck seemed to take a step back while her head stayed perfectly in place. “I’m allowed to express myself freely to my friends. If you don’t like it, perhaps you should break your nasty eavesdropping habit.”

“You aren’t allowed to sabotage my relationship with Neil. Say what you want about me, but that’s where it ends!” I clenched my hands to fists at my side. “If I ever hear you talking about Neil like that, like he’s an infant you have to raise, if I ever hear you suggest you have even a hint of say over our lives again, I will cut off your access to him faster than you give me one of your stupid fake apologies.”

She laughed haughtily, but it was so obviously forced as to highlight her sudden fear. “Neil and I have a daughter together, Sophie. He couldn’t cut me out of his life, even if he wanted to.”

“Your daughter isn’t five, Valerie. He doesn’t ever have to be in the same place with you ever again.” Except for work. Shit. I decided to bluff. “He’s retired now. He could ship you off to the London office in some kind of restructure.”

She didn’t have anything to say to that.

So I added, “How do you think he’s going to react when he finds out that, after a year, you’re still trying to break us up? Because I have this crazy feeling that you know exactly what he would think. And you also know what he would do, if I asked him to.”

She did. I saw it in the watery gleam along her lower lashes.

Good. She deserved to cry. She deserved to feel like shit, if that was how she was going to treat Neil, and me. “Toe the fucking line, Valerie. Step one centimeter out of bounds, and after the wedding, I’ll tell Neil that you think you’re pulling the strings. You know control freak Neil would just
love
that, don’t you?”

Valerie went so still, I thought she might have stopped breathing.

“Cross me again. I dare you. You piss me off, and I ask him to cut off all contact with you, indefinitely.”