Chapter Eight - The Rehearsal

The wedding rehearsal was scheduled for six o'clock on Saturday evening, in the same church where Sophie's parents had married twenty-eight years earlier, and where Charlotte was supposed to marry Julian in six days' time.

Sophie stood at the back of the nave in a borrowed cardigan, watching the wedding coordinator — a brisk, efficient woman named Priya who carried a clipboard like a weapon — direct the bridal party into position with the patience of someone who had clearly done this a hundred times.

"Bride and groom, if you wouldn't mind," Priya called, gesturing toward the back of the aisle. "We'll run the processional first, then the vows, then the recessional. Try to walk at the pace you'll actually walk on the day , I've had brides sprint down the aisle before out of nerves and it ruins the photographs."

Sophie's stomach turned over. She had been so consumed by the logistics of surviving each individual encounter — the dinners, the gallery, the planning meeting at the Langham that she hadn't fully absorbed what the rehearsal would actually require of her, An actual physical performance of the wedding itself, in front of the wedding party, the priest, Margaret, and Edmund, all watching to see if it looked right.

Julian appeared at her elbow as if he'd read the exact moment her composure started to slip.

"You look like you're about to be sick," he said quietly, low enough that no one else could hear.

"I'm fine."

"You're not, but that's all right." He offered his arm with the same easy formality he'd shown on the first night, and. "Just walk. I'll be right there"

She took his arm. His hand settled over hers, warm and certain, and they made their way to the back of the church to take their places.

The processional itself was almost bearable , a long, slow walk down an aisle lined with empty pews. Sophie kept her eyes fixed on Julian, who stood waiting at the front exactly as he would on the actual day, and found that looking at him made the whole exercise feel less like rehearsing a lie and more like something she could almost believe in, if she let herself.

That was the dangerous part. She was aware of it even as it happened.

"Lovely," Priya called, when she reached the front. "Now, we'll have the readings — your cousin's doing one, I believe, and the groom's uncle the other — but we can skip ahead to the vows for now, since that's the part everyone always wants to get right."

The priest, an older man with kind eyes and the unhurried manner of someone who had married hundreds of couples and buried just as many, stepped forward with a soft smile.

"We'll just run through the basic structure," he said. "You needn't say the actual words today, just stand where you'll stand and get used to the shape of it. Face each other, please."

Sophie turned to face Julian.

It was, on its surface, nothing — two people standing at an altar a few feet apart, the ordinary architecture of a wedding rehearsal. But something about the proximity, the formality of the priest's voice, the empty pews behind them holding the ghost-shape of all the people who would actually be watching in six days, made the moment feel suddenly, dangerously real.

Julian's eyes found hers and held there.

"Take her hands," the priest instructed gently.

Julian reached out. Sophie placed her hands in his, and the warmth of his fingers closing around hers sent a current up through her arms that had nothing to do with rehearsal and everything to do with the fact that she had spent the last several days trying very hard not to think about exactly this.

"In an actual ceremony," the priest continued, "you'd exchange your vows here. For now, we'll simply mark the moment — a brief pause, a look between you, before moving to the rings."

The pause stretched.

Sophie was aware of Priya somewhere off to the side, murmuring something about lighting to an assistant. She was aware of her mother in the second pew, dabbing at her eyes with a tissue despite the fact that none of this was real, that the actual emotion in the room belonged to no one official version of this wedding at all. She was aware, distantly, of Theo standing near the side door with his arms crossed, watching the two of them with an expression she couldn't quite read from this distance.

Mostly, though, she was aware of Julian.

He was looking at her the way he'd looked at her in the storage unit, the way he'd looked at her at the gallery — steady, entirely present, like there was nowhere else in the world he needed to be. His thumb moved once, almost imperceptibly, across the back of her hand. It would have looked, to anyone watching, like the natural gesture of a man comforting his nervous bride.

It did not feel like that to Sophie. It felt like something far more dangerous than nerves.

"Lovely," the priest said again, breaking the moment with the same gentle efficiency he'd used throughout. "We'll move to the rings now — Theo, if you'd step forward as best man—"

Theo crossed from the side door, and the rehearsal continued through its mechanical paces — the ring exchange, the pronouncement, the kiss that Priya assured them they could "mime, obviously, no need to actually do it during rehearsal" — and Sophie was grateful for the interruption even as some traitorous part of her noted the specific shape of disappointment in not finishing what the moment had started to suggest.

They ran through the recessional twice, Priya adjusting their pace each time, before finally declaring the rehearsal complete.

The rehearsal dinner was smaller than the actual wedding would be — close family only, a private room at a restaurant overlooking the river.

 She found herself seated between her mother and Theo, with Julian and Edmund across the table, close enough to be part of the same conversation but distant enough that she could observe him without being obviously caught doing it.

"You did well today," Theo said quietly, leaning toward her under the cover of Edmund's expansive toast about family and partnership and the joining of two great houses. "The vows bit, especially. You looked like you actually meant it."

Sophie kept her eyes on her wine glass. "It's called acting, Theo."

"Is it? Because from where I was standing, it didn't look like acting. It looked like you forgot, for about thirty seconds, that any of this was supposed to be pretend."

Sophie didn't answer that, because she didn't trust herself to lie convincingly to Theo Calloway twice in one week.

Across the table, Edmund was deep in conversation with Margaret about flower arrangements. Julian, beside him, was quieter than usual, his eyes drifting toward Sophie more often than strictly necessary for a man simply enjoying his rehearsal dinner.

It was Edmund who noticed first, before Theo said a word. Sophie realized it a beat too late — that she'd drifted somewhere distant during his toast, her eyes fixed on the candle flame rather than on him, Edmund's gaze caught on her from across the table, "Charlotte," he said, breaking from his conversation with Margaret. "You've gone quiet on us. Everything all right?"

Sophie felt every eye at the table shift toward her at once. "Sorry. Long week. I was just thinking how lovely tonight has been."

Edmund studied her for a moment longer than the answer required, his expression unreadable beneath its practiced warmth. "You've been somewhere else most of the evening, if I'm honest. Distracted." He smiled, but it didn't quite reach the assessment still moving behind his eyes. "Cold feet, perhaps. I'm told it happens to the best brides."

"Something like that," Sophie managed, reaching for her wine glass to give her hands something to do.

"Well." Edmund returned his attention to Margaret, the moment apparently closing as quickly as it had opened. "Five more days, and then none of us will have to worry about nerves any longer."

Sophie kept her smile fixed in place until he looked away, and only then allowed herself to exhale.  

 "For two people who keep insisting this is purely business, you're both remarkably bad at hiding whatever this actually is."

Sophie set down her glass with more force than necessary. "What do you want me to say?"

"Nothing." Theo's expression softened, the teasing edge falling away into something more genuine. "I just want you to be careful. Both of you. Because right now this is a secret three people are keeping, and that's already two people too many for something this fragile. If it gets to four — if my father starts looking at the two of you the way I just watched you look at each other during the vows, the way he was just watching you now — there won't be a version of this that ends well for anyone."

The warning settled into Sophie's chest like a stone. She glanced across the table, where Julian had finally turned his attention fully to whatever Edmund was saying, his expression smoothed back into the careful composure she'd come to recognize as his default setting in front of his father. But she'd seen what was underneath it now, at the altar, in the storage unit, at the gallery. She didn't think she could unsee it.

"I know," she said quietly. "I know how dangerous this is."

"Do you?" Theo asked, not unkindly. "Because from where I'm sitting, it doesn't look like knowing is doing either of you any good."

Glasses were raised around the table — to family, to partnership, to the wedding that was now five days away — and Sophie raised hers along with everyone else, the wine bitter and warm in her throat, and caught Julian's eyes across the table one more time before she made herself look away.

It was nearly eleven by the time the dinner ended, the wedding party dispersing into the cool evening with promises of seeing each other in a few days for the final preparations. Sophie's mother had already gone ahead to the car, leaving Sophie alone on the restaurant's front steps for a moment, the city noise washing over her in place of the careful quiet of the private dining room.

Julian found her there.

"You survived," he said, coming to stand beside her, close enough that their shoulders nearly touched.

"Barely." She wrapped her arms around herself against the evening chill. "Theo noticed. At the altar. He said it didn't look like acting. And your father noticed something too, during the toast — I drifted, and he caught it."

Something flickered across Julian's face — not surprise, she realized. He'd suspected this. "He mentioned it to me as well, just before we left. Said you seemed distracted lately." His jaw tightened. "I told him it was nerves. He didn't entirely believe me."

"What does that mean?"

"It means we have less time than we thought," Julian said quietly. "My father doesn't say things twice unless he intends to keep watching."

Sophie felt the cold settle deeper into her chest, and not entirely from the evening air. "Julian—"

"I know." He reached out, not touching her, just letting his hand hover near hers for a moment before letting it fall. "I know we agreed. I know the wedding is in five days, and Charlotte is still missing, and your mother's entire future depends on none of this falling apart before we've figured out what to do. I know all of it." His eyes held hers, steady and unguarded in a way she'd rarely seen from him. "I just don't know how to stand at an altar with you, even a pretend one, and not feel the entire thing as if it were real. And now I don't know how much longer we have before my father stops merely noticing and starts actually looking."

Sophie stood very still, aware of how close they were standing, aware of everything Theo had warned her about not twenty minutes earlier, and aware, more than anything, that she didn't actually want the distance between them to be any larger than it currently was.

Her mother's car pulled up to the curb, headlights cutting across the pavement, ending the moment before Sophie could find something to say.

"Goodnight, Julian," she managed.

"Goodnight, Sophie."

She got into the car without looking back, though she felt his eyes on her the entire way, and spent the ride home with her forehead against the cool glass of the window, replaying his words — and Edmund's watchful eyes across the candlelit table — until they'd worn a groove into her chest she suspected wasn't going anywhere any time soon.