The Cane

Uncle Walter didn't hurry. He never had, not in all the years I had known him. He came down the stone path one slow step at a time, and the tip of his cane clicked on every stone, and every person at that gate went quiet to listen to it.

Gloria lowered her phone a little. She didn't know who he was to me. All she knew was that this was Walter Wexley, the man her son had been chasing for two years, the man Trent talked about at every single dinner. I watched her fix her hat with one hand and try to arrange her face into something pleasant.

"Mr. Wexley," she said, and her voice had gone high and sweet. "I'm so sorry you had to see all this. This girl has been nothing but trouble from the start, and I was just telling her—"

"Woman."

He didn't raise his voice. He didn't need to. Gloria's mouth stayed open, but nothing else came out of it.

Uncle Walter stopped a few feet from her and rested both hands on top of his cane.

"If you say one more word," he said, "I will cancel every deal your son is begging me for. Every meeting. Every call his office has been making to mine. All of it, today."

The car park went so quiet that I could hear the quartet's cellist packing up her instrument back on the lawn.

I watched the colour leave Gloria's face. It went slowly, from her forehead down to her chin, and the pink from the heat turned a strange, blotchy grey. Her eyes went to Uncle Walter's face, then to his cane, then to the phone in her own hand, and I could see her doing the sums. Two years of Trent's begging. All those emails and all those dinners.

"And delete that," Uncle Walter added, nodding at the phone.

Gloria looked down at it. Her thumb hovered over the screen for a second, and then she pressed delete, and she pressed it again to make sure, and she held the phone up so he could see the empty screen.

Then she did something I had never seen her do in three years of living with her.

She bowed.

It was a small, stiff, awkward bow, and her hat slipped forward over her eyes when she did it. "I'm sorry, Mr. Wexley," she said. "I didn't mean any offence to you. Please don't hold it against my son. He has such respect for you."

She said sorry to him. Not to me, and not to my mother, whose face she had pointed her finger into ten minutes ago. Just to the man with the money.

And the funny thing was, I didn't mind at all. Standing there on Hollis's jacket with my feet finally cooling, I realised that I was enjoying this more than I had enjoyed anything in a very long time. Gloria Marsh had no idea that the old man she was bowing to had held me on his knee at my fifth birthday party. She had no idea that he still called me sweetheart on the phone every Christmas. She had just bowed to my godfather to apologise for insulting me, and she didn't even know it.

I pressed my lips together so I wouldn't smile.

Uncle Walter didn't answer her. He turned away from her, and when he looked at me, his whole face changed. The quiet hardness went out of it, and the corners of his eyes creased up, and he was just Uncle Walter again, the man who used to slip twenty-pound notes into my coat pocket when he thought my mother wasn't looking.

"Go, child," he said gently.

And then he winked at me.

I laughed. I didn't mean to, and it came out as a small, shaky sound that surprised both of us. It was the first time I had laughed all day.

Behind me, Hollis had finished his calls. He was standing by the open car door with his phone in his hand, and Uncle Walter looked past me and gave his son a long, meaningful look.

"Don't keep her waiting," Uncle Walter told him.

He said it very quietly, and there was something odd in the way he said it, something tired and almost relieved. I had the strangest feeling that he had been waiting a long time himself.

Hollis didn't answer his father. He just held the car door open a little wider and looked at me.

I got in.

The car was cool inside and smelled of clean leather. Sam closed the door behind me, walked around to the driver's seat and started the engine without a single word. Hollis didn't get in. Through the tinted window I watched him pick up his dusty jacket from the gravel and walk toward another car further down the row.

I took a breath, and then another one. My hands had started to shake in my lap, so I pressed them flat against my dress until they stopped.

Then I called Juno.

Juno Bell had been my best friend since we were eleven, and she was the only person besides my family who knew who I really was. She had been stuck in a client meeting across town all morning and was meant to arrive in time for the reception. She picked up on the first ring.

"Is it done?" she shouted over the noise of traffic. "Are you Mrs. Marsh? Send me a picture, I want to see the—"

"He left," I said. "Trent left. He went to get Lacey."

There was a silence. Then Juno screamed, a long furious scream that made Sam's eyes flick up to the rear-view mirror, and then she started swearing in two languages, and then, very suddenly, she started to cry.

"Oh, Dee," she said. "Oh, sweetheart, I'm so sorry. I'm getting a taxi right now. Where are you? Are you home? Don't go home, his mother's there."

"I'm not going home," I said. "I'm getting married."

She stopped crying instantly. "You're what?"

I started to explain, and halfway through, I noticed something. Juno was crying for me, and my voice was steady, and my eyes were completely dry. I had cried over Trent so many times in five years. I had cried in bathrooms and in the car and into my pillow so he wouldn't hear. And today, on the worst day of all, there was nothing left to cry with.

My phone buzzed against my ear with a new message. I took it down and looked at the screen.

It was from a number I didn't have saved. Natalie Cho will meet you at her studio. Thirty minutes. — H.

I stared at it. I had never given Hollis Wexley my number. I was almost certain of that.

"Dee? Hello? Who are you marrying?"

"I'll call you back," I said, and I hung up on my best friend for the first time in fifteen years.

Natalie Cho's studio was on the top floor of an old brick building near the river. I had walked past it a hundred times and never gone in, because Natalie Cho dressed actresses and royals and women whose names were on hospital wings, and I had been a secretary with a secret.

She was waiting for me at the door herself. She was small and elegant, with her grey hair cut short and a measuring tape around her neck, and she took one look at me and said, "Oh, you poor thing. Come in, come in."

The studio was cool and white and full of light. In the middle of the room, hanging alone on a rail, was a long garment bag.

"Mr. Wexley called," Natalie said. She went to the rail and took hold of the zip. "I think you'll like it."

She pulled the zip down.

The gown inside was ivory silk, plain and simple and so beautiful that my breath caught. It had a high neck and long, narrow sleeves, and it was cut so cleanly that it barely needed a single seam. It was exactly the kind of dress I would have drawn for myself, if anyone had ever asked me.

Natalie turned the bodice gently to show me the inside, and that was when I saw the tag.

It was a small white label stitched into the lining. Someone had written on it by hand in blue pen, in neat, careful figures.

They were my measurements. My exact measurements. And they had been written there long before today.