The Door I Locked

Chapter Ten: The Bathroom

I found the nearest door that led inward, away from the garden and the string quartet and the specific gravity of him, and it happened to open onto a powder room just off the main hall — small, thankfully empty, all soft lighting and pale tile, the kind of room designed for exactly nothing more dramatic than fixing a smudge of lipstick before dinner.

I locked the door. I am aware, even as I did it, of the echo — another locked door, seven years apart, my body apparently still fluent in this particular instinct. I put both hands flat on the edge of the sink and looked at myself in the mirror and watched, with a strange, detached interest, as my composure finally gave out entirely.

I didn't sob, not the way I had at twenty-one on my bedroom floor. This was quieter and somehow worse — silent, shaking, my whole chest working to hold something in that had no intention of being held. Seven years. Seven years of boardrooms and armor and telling Sofia and everyone else that I was fine, and it had taken exactly one look across a garden to prove how much of that had been performance rather than fact.

I don't know how long I stood there. Long enough that my hands had stopped shaking by the time I heard the door handle turn, then stop, finding the lock.

Sorry — occupied," I managed, my voice doing an admirable impression of someone who wasn't falling apart.

"Take your time." A woman's voice, warm, unhurried. "I'll just be out here whenever."

I splashed water on my face, breathed my four counts, and opened the door expecting to find someone impatient, someone I could apologize to quickly and slip past. Instead I found a woman about my age, dark-haired, kind-eyed, holding a small clutch and wearing an expression that shifted the instant she saw my face — from polite waiting into immediate, uncomplicated concern.

Oh — hey. Are you okay?"

I opened my mouth to give her the same practiced non-answer I'd been handing out all evening, and something about the plainness of her kindness — a total stranger, asking with no agenda at all except actual care — undid the last of my composure instead. "Rough night," I managed. "Sorry. I'm fine. Weddings, you know."

Say no more." She didn't push, which I was grateful for, and didn't leave either, which surprised me more. She dug through her clutch and produced a small travel packet of tissues, holding them out like this was the most ordinary transaction in the world. "Here. I always carry these to weddings. Someone's always crying — happy tears, sad tears, allergy tears. I've learned to come prepared."

I laughed despite myself, a wet, unglamorous sound, and took the tissues. "Thank you. Genuinely."

Don't mention it." She smiled, easy and unbothered, the kind of person who clearly extended this exact warmth to strangers as a matter of course rather than effort. "I'm actually hiding out here too, a little. My boyfriend's been swallowed by old college friends for the last twenty minutes and I don't know a soul at this thing besides him."

"I know that feeling," I said, which was, in its own way, the truest thing I'd said all night.

She checked her makeup briefly in the mirror beside me, unhurried, easy in her own skin in a way I found myself quietly envying. As she leaned in toward the glass, I caught something — faint, familiar, entirely disorienting — a note of cologne that didn't belong to her, carried home on her collar the way it settles onto someone after a hug, after standing close to someone all evening. I knew that scent. I would have known it in a crowded room, in the dark, after seven years of trying very hard to forget it.

I told myself it was nothing. Colognes aren't unique. Half the men in that garden probably wore something similar. I pushed the thought down with the same efficient discipline I'd used on every other unwanted thought that night, and I didn't let myself examine it any further.

"I should get back," she said, capping her lipstick, offering me one more easy, unknowing smile in the mirror. "Good luck out there. Whatever it is."

You too," I said, and meant it, with no idea yet — none at all — exactly how much luck the two of us were both actually going to need.

She left before I did. I stayed a moment longer, tissues still in hand, staring at my own reflection and trying, without success, to talk myself out of the small, cold feeling that had settled low in my stomach the second I'd caught that scent.