The Understudy Bride

Mia felt the zipper catch against a knot in the fabric. The tailor didn't apologize — just yanked it hard, and it gave a small tearing sound that made them both freeze for a second before checking the seam held. "Breathe out," the woman said. "I am breathing out." "Breathe out more." The zipper caught her spine, and Mia held still while the tailor worked it free and dragged it the rest of the way up. She caught her reflection almost by accident. White silk, a neckline cut lower than she'd have picked herself. Her eyebrows were wrong — someone had drawn them in sharper, more arched — and her hair had been curled and left loose, falling the way Bianca always wore hers. "There," the tailor said, stepping back and giving it an approving look. "It fits like it was made for you." Mia almost laughed; it was made for Bianca, right down to the last carefully measured inch. She knew because she'd been here four months ago, sipping Bianca's coffee while the tailor pinned and marked and whispered about the wedding of the year. "Loosen the bust a little," Mia said. "I don't need this much..." She gestured vaguely at the amount of dress cascading over her shoulders, all of which would be on display for three hundred strangers she'd never meet. The tailor blinked at her. "Loosen it? Honey, this fit you a dress two days ago." MIA FROZE. "You fit this dress two days ago on me." "On you, yeah. Standard bridal procedure, we always do a final fitting the day before," the tailor said. She paused, her eyes flicking over Mia's face. "We always do a final..." She stopped talking, her gaze snapping toward Mia's pin cushion. Mia followed her eyes to it on the table, a certain style of pins sticking out of it that had never been there before. She was about to ask another question when the door blew open so hard it hit the wall, and her father stood in the opening, his tie knotted incorrectly and his face the color of wet concrete. "Dad-" said. "Is she here?" Robert Alvarez's eyes snapped over the room like he expected to see his daughter materialize behind a set of veils. "Tell me she's here." "She's not with me, I thought she was with you—" He held up his phone, where a text message waited, undisturbed by anyone, for the last forty minutes, because no one had had their phone out during their hair and makeup. "Can't do it. Don't look for me. Tell them whatever works. --B Mia read it over and over, and something cold and quiet in practical, hotel-event-planning. Mia noted with professional detachment that this was not a panicked text. This was not a text written by a woman who'd changed her mind at the last minute and needed reassurance. This wasn't Bianca's note—Bianca's notes were always full of exclamation marks and heart emojis even when she was furious—it was a text written by someone who knew in absolute, cold certainty what they were doing. Someone who'd been ordered to say this. "When did she send this?" "I don't know, I don't — Mia, listen to me." Her father crossed the room and gripped her hands in his, and they shook, actually shook, for the first time in twenty-six years. "There are three hundred people out there, half of Manhattans's finance industry, the Coles are out there-" "Okay, so we tell them. People postpone weddings all the time. It's embarrassing but it's not." "We can't postpone." His grip on her hands tightened. "Mia, listen to me. The merger with Cole hotels, the contract specifies that the marriage takes place today, or the entire deal is void, and I am—" He had to stop himself, swallow, square his shoulders. "I am in a position I cannot get out of if that happens." "What position?" "There is no time for this." Her father pulled away her hands and placed his hands on his temples. For a moment, he looked as if he was trying to hold his own head on. When he opened his eyes again, he looked away from her and his whole face seemed to change, and turned back to her. "I need you to go out there." The room fell impossibly quiet. The tailor actually stopped pretending to fold clothes and listened. "You want me to," Mia looked down at the dress in her hands, at the dress that fit her, that had obviously fit her because it had been fitted to her back two days ago, quietly, while everyone assumed it was a fitting for someone else. "No. Absolutely not, that's insane." She looked back up at her father. "He's marrying Bianca, he's never even met me." "He's marrying a Cole-Alvarez alliance. This contract doesn't name her, Mia, he signed it with my name and his and his lawyers' and mine, all of us, and it states 'daughter of Robert Alvarez, of legal age and in good standing.' The officiant doesn't ask for her name until the vows, and no one out there has seen either of you outside of magazines since four years ago, and the veil covers your face until the kiss, and no one will know. We fix it after, quietly, an annulment, six months from now—"Do you hear yourself?" I heard that if this falls through I will lose everything, the house, the company, and there are people involved in this loan that you don't want to owe any more money than you have to, Mia." Her father's voice cracks on her name. "I have never asked you for anything. Twenty-six years, I have never asked you for anything." This was a lie, and it made the sharpest ache, because it was true. Mia had never asked him for anything, either. She had never asked for much of anyone, really. When the lights in the room went out one after another with a soft switch of electricity, the tailor turned off all but one lamp—the one Mia was using. Mia listened to the sound of the wedding going on, the faint buzz of the three hundred people who would remember this day for the rest of their lives, the string quartet tuning itself in the distance. She thought about the version of this story where she refused, where she walked out the side door in her sage green bridesmaid's dress and everyone found out where her father found out, found out that he would lose everything, that she would be poorer by a hundred thousand dollars that would never be hers to spend. She thought about that version for about four seconds, then about the version of this story where she said yes, where it ended in an afternoon and no one else's life was forever ruined, and her father's house still had a roof, and six months from now someone would send an invoice for a few thousand dollars, and it would all be over, and Mia could remember it as something that had happened to her, and no one else. "Give me the veil," she said. Her father sagged with such relief it almost looked like pain. "You won't regret this. I promise you, you won't regret this." Mia didn't believe him, but she stood still while the tailor lowered the veil over her face. "There," the woman said, stepping back to check the pins. "Now you two could be twins." She meant it as a compliment. Mia didn't answer.