The Dress Shop of Dreams (26 page)

“It’s not really right,” she says, dragging the drink toward her. She sits and stares into it, both hands wrapped around the cup. “But thank you for coming.”

“I told you I always would, if you needed me.”

While Mateo slides magnets across the fridge, mercifully oblivious to his mother’s sorrow, Francesca stares into her coffee, and Henry wonders what dreadful thing has undone her. He’s never seen her like this before. She’s the sort of woman who always remains calm, even in the midst of situations that would cause other people to panic. Apart from the last time, he can’t remember ever seeing Francesca looking anything less than entirely gorgeous and glamorous, even after giving birth to their son. So what’s happened? It’s nothing to do with Mattie, he’s certain, or she’d never have let him out of her arms.

“What’s wrong, Fran?” he says gently. “What happened?”

Francesca mumbles words into her coffee cup. Henry leans forward, trying to snatch up the echo of the words, but they evaporate too quickly into the air. Not daring to ask her again, Henry waits. When she starts to cry he pushes his chair back, skirts around the table in three steps and gives her a tentative hug, leaning his chest into her back, wrapping his arms around hers, resting his face against her head. As she cries Henry tightens his hug so she can sink her weight into him, dropping her head into his hold. As Mateo plays a few feet away, Henry stands in the kitchen he built, wondering what’s happening, while his ex-wife sobs into his arms.

Henry holds Francesca for a long time. When she finally wipes her eyes she won’t look at him.

“Thank you for everything,” she says. “You’ve been very kind.”

Henry just nods. He senses she’s on the edge of telling him something of great significance, a secret,
the
secret perhaps, the reason she left him, and so he waits, saying nothing. When she finally speaks, it’s in a rush so fast he has to grab each word as it falls then play it back in his head.

“I hurt Mattie.”

“What?”

“I slapped him, hard.” Tears slide down her cheeks. “It’s not the first time.”

“What?” Henry says again. “I don’t understand.” His head is spinning as she speaks. He feels as if he’s slipped down the rabbit hole into an inverted universe where nothing makes sense anymore. Francesca loves Mateo, more than anything, he knows this for certain, so why would she hurt him?

“What happened?” he asks.

Francesca takes a deep breath. “I’m an alcoholic.”

“Hello again,” Judith says, rather wary. “Did you just knock on my door?”

Cora looks up slowly, inwardly cursing Henry, while wishing she’d evaporate, seep quickly and silently into the air. Sadly, since to run away again would be unforgivably rude, she has no other choice but to look up.

“Hello,” Cora says, trying to sound light and bright, quite the opposite from someone who breaks down screaming in strangers’ houses. “Yes, well, actually my friend did, but he’s—”

“Your friend?”

Cora can see Judith getting more suspicious by the second.

“Well, sort of, but he’s a policeman.”

“A policeman?”

“Yes, but it’s nothing bad, we just—”

“What did he want?” Judith asks, her voice getting a little high-pitched.

“We just wanted to, um …” At this point Cora wonders what exactly they had been going to do in this woman’s house. “I guess, look around for clues.”

“Clues to what?”

“Um …” Cora can see her chances of getting back into the house, even accompanied by Henry, fading rapidly. There’s only one thing to do now: tell the truth. She walks slowly up the steps, smiling in a way she hopes suggests both sanity and friendliness. “My parents died in your house, twenty years ago,” Cora explains as she walks. “I had a bit of a … flashback last time I was here, that’s why I—anyway, I was talking to the police about it and the investigating officer, Detective Dixon, he thought it would be worth checking your house, to see if we might see anything.” Cora thinks it best to avoid words like
blood samples
and
fire
and
police cover-ups
. Stick as close to the facts as possible without causing undue alarm.

Judith frowns. “Like what?”

“I don’t know,” Cora admits.

“But this happened twenty years ago?”

“I know. It’s ridiculous, but he just thought—”

“Okay, well …”

Cora sees a tiny window of opportunity opening up. “It’d mean an awful lot to me. I wouldn’t take up too much of your time, I promise.”

“All right,” Judith relents, “I suppose it won’t hurt for you to have a look. Unless …”

“Don’t worry,” Cora says, offering another reassuring smile as she reaches the top step. “I absolutely promise I won’t scream again.”

“Wow,” Walt says when Milly opens the door. “You look, you look … Wow.”

“Thank you.” Milly smiles.

Walt shrugs. “I’m at a loss for words.” And he really is; at the sight of this dress he’s forgotten everything he had been meaning to say (something about their relationship?) and can only see just how breathtakingly beautiful Milly looks.

“Good.” Milly takes his hand and leads him into the living room. He’s early, she hasn’t even started dinner yet and had of course been planning on taking the dress off while she cooked. But now, seeing Walt’s face—his glazed eyes and open mouth, as if he’s been drugged or enchanted—Milly wonders if she might not need to bother with food after all.

“Is that the dress you bought from Etta’s shop?”

“Yes. Do you like it?”

“Do I like it?” Walt laughs. Something snags at his subconscious, thoughts of Etta, of mystery and magic. But none of these thoughts forms a coherent sentence in his head. “No, I hate it. It’s hideous. Ugliest dress I’ve ever seen. Destroy it immediately.”

“Why don’t you rip it off me?” Milly smiles. It’s a seductive little smile, a suggestive smile.

For a second Milly almost stops. She shouldn’t be doing this, she should at least talk to him about it first. But it’s the right
time of the month, her biological clock is ticking so loud it’s drowning out her rational mind and surges of hormones are making her dizzy. Gazing into Walt’s enchanted eyes, in this moment Milly has never been happier. Not in ten years. The gap between them has gone. Evaporated, disappeared, vanished in a flash of silk and lace. Now, when she looks into his eyes he is gazing back at her, when she touches him she feels him closer than he’s ever been. When they reach the sofa Milly stops walking. She draws Walt’s hand around her waist and, when he’s holding her tight with both hands, Milly stands on her tiptoes and kisses him.

Cora is following Judith down the corridor of her childhood home when she stops. Hanging on the wall in a silver frame is something she has seen before, a long time ago. She must have missed it the first time—in the daze and the screaming—she’d visited the house.

“What’s this?”

Judith turns back. “What?”

Cora points to the frame. Inside, mounted on a background of cream and gold, is a page ripped from a notebook. The page is covered with annotated equations drawn in a thick, black pen.

“Where did you get this?”

Judith walks back down the corridor until she reaches Cora.

“We found it a few years ago,” she says, “well, my husband did. In a safe downstairs, hidden behind some hideous wallpaper. Anyway, we thought it was compelling somehow, not that we could understand it, being rather like hieroglyphics …”

It’s then that Cora remembers where she has seen these same equations before.

Chapter Twenty-Four

W
hen she steps inside the church Etta glances around, half expecting Sebastian to be hiding behind a pew or behind a statue. Not that he would be, since he has no idea that she is even coming. But how will Sebastian react when he sees her? Will he recognize her? Will he hold out his hand or will he hug her? And how will he react when she tells him her secret? Will he cry? Will he slap her? Will he hate her forevermore?

Etta walks slowly along the aisle. This is the first time she’s walked down an aisle, or indeed been in a church, since she met Sebastian, because she married Joe in a registry office a few weeks before she started showing with Maggie. When Etta has peeked into every nook and cranny of the church but found neither priest nor parishioners, she sits on a pew and waits.

It’s nearly an hour before Sebastian shuffles out of the vestry. He passes the votive candles and is almost at the pulpit when he
sees Etta. Sebastian stops. He stares at her, bringing a hand slowly to his chest. For a moment she thinks he might be about to suffer a heart attack but then Sebastian slowly walks forward until he’s only a few feet from Etta.

“It is you.”

Etta nods.

“Every day I’ve imagined you sitting there,” Sebastian says softly. “I wasn’t quite certain if you were real.”

In one sentence he has brought Etta more joy than she ever imagined possible. She smiles. “I am.”

“May I?” Sebastian nods at the pew and, when Etta nods in response, he sits down next to her. After a few moments he reaches out and slowly slips his hand over hers. He closes his eyes, drops his chin to his chest and breathes quietly as tears roll down his cheeks. Etta closes her eyes, too. For a full thirty minutes they sit together, not saying anything. There seems to be nothing to say. Until, at last, Etta remembers that there is, that she came here for a reason.

“I have something to confess,” she whispers.

“Then you’ve come to the right place.” Sebastian squeezes her hand and offers a little smile. “You are more beautiful than I’ve ever seen you,” he says.

Etta laughs. “I can hardly imagine that’s true,” she says. “I was nineteen when you met me, I’m sixty-nine now, so—”

“—so, you’ve lived a whole life,” Sebastian says. “I can see it on your face and it’s beautiful.”

Etta smiles. “You always were a charmer.”

“I’m a priest,” Sebastian says solemnly. “I never lie.”

“Thank you, you’re very kind.”

“I mean every word.”

And Etta can tell he does, though she still can’t quite believe
it. This reunion, the possibility that she has been thinking about nearly every day for fifty years is so easy and uneventful. She feared there might be drama, anger, rejection or, perhaps worst of all, that Sebastian simply wouldn’t be moved to any emotion at all, that he’d greet her as he might any old friend. But, incredibly, the reunion is surpassing all her happiest fantasies. Although, Etta realizes, that might be about to change.

“You may hate me for it,” she says, wanting to prepare them both for the worst.

“I doubt that.”

“Well …”

Etta glances at Sebastian and he gives her hand a gentle squeeze.

“Try me.”

Suddenly Etta has the urge to talk about anything and everything else but that. She can tell him all about her life, all the things he doesn’t know, all the good and loving things she’s done. Maybe then he’ll forgive her this one sin.

“It seems to me,” Sebastian interrupts Etta’s thoughts, “since you’re here, that you may have forgiven me for what I did to you. The thing I have never forgiven myself for. Can this be true?”

Etta frowns. “Of course it is. But I never felt I had anything to forgive, so—I didn’t blame you. I understood. Of course I understood.”

Sebastian releases his breath. “I feel … I feel as if you have blessed my soul.”

Etta smiles.

“Whatever it is,” Sebastian says, “whatever you’ve done, I will forgive you. I can promise you that.”

“I, I …” Etta closes her eyes again. “I had a daughter,” she begins.

Cora stares at the framed page on the wall. She last saw these equations four years ago, when she stayed up for two days straight reading the entire collection of papers that Dr. Baxter had published over the last twenty years of his illustrious career, a career that had skyrocketed on the back of his world-changing creation, the discovery for which he’d been awarded a Nobel Prize in Biochemistry. The paper describing that startling inspiration and creation had been the first he’d published in
Science
and the first Cora had read. It had centered around one set of chemical equations that had been replicated for the reader. Cora had stared at them in awe then and she was staring at them now.

“Is there something wrong?” Judith interrupts Cora’s thoughts.

Cora pulls herself away from the page with every ounce of will she has.

“This is my father’s handwriting. These are his initials.” Cora points to a scribble at the bottom right-hand corner of the page. “My parents wrote this,” she says. “They must have been working on it before the fire.”

“What fire?” Judith asks, sounding slightly nervous.

“The fire they died in,” Cora says without stopping or thinking, no longer caring about concealing anything. “The fire we thought destroyed all their research.”

“Really?” Judith says, nerves now erased by curiosity. “Gosh, I didn’t know they were famous scientists.”

“Did you find any other papers?” Cora asks, trying hard not to get her hopes up too high.

Judith nods.