The Wedding Dress She Won

The bridal suite at the Wexford Point Hotel smelled like lavender and fresh carpet glue. I stood in front of a letter-size sheet of paper taped to the mirror, my altered to-do schedule, and I was running eleven minutes behind. My name is Elena Marsh. I am thirty-one years old, and for the last six years I have coached competitive sudoku for a private prep academy in the coastal town of Calloway Bay. It is not a glamorous career. There is no trophy case for it. But the kids I coach have won three national tournaments, and I have never lost a match I played myself. Not once. Eight months of planning sat on that mirror in neat black ink. Flowers confirmed. Photographer confirmed. The organist had texted me at 6:12 that morning to say he had the wrong processional piece. I had fixed it with two texts. My mother was downstairs in the lobby, already in her dress, pretending not to smoke. The wedding was at four. Two hundred guests were already arriving. The ceremony would be in the old courtyard under the trellis I had picked because the light hit it at exactly the right angle at exactly four-fifteen, and I had sat in that courtyard for three afternoons with a light meter to prove it. The dress hung on the back of the suite door, inside a white garment bag. I had not eaten anything since six that morning. When I am nervous, I don't eat. When I am angry, I don't eat either. I had been both since Tuesday, when my fiancé Grant Hollis came home and told me that his oldest friend, Vanessa Crane, would be arriving for the wedding, and that she would be staying with us for the week at our house on Harborline Road. Vanessa. I had heard her name for ten years. Grant and Vanessa had grown up three doors apart in the same gated neighborhood. Their families had held season tickets to the same tennis club. Grant's mother still kept a photograph of the two of them at age seven, holding matching fishing poles, on the mantel in her house in Calloway Hills. I had seen that photograph. I had walked past it a hundred times at family dinners and pretended I did not notice that it occupied the position of honor in the house where my wedding was being planned. She was not coming as a guest. She was coming as something else, though I could not have told you what until that morning in the bridal suite. At 1:03, my best friend and matron of honor, Priya, knocked on the door and came in with coffee. She looked at me and said, "You look like you've seen a ghost." "I haven't yet," I said. "It's still early." The door opened again at 1:41. I heard her before I saw her. She has that laugh, the kind that makes people turn around in restaurants because they want to know who is having that much fun. Grant always said it was the most distinct laugh he had ever heard. He said it the way a man says something he has said before, many times, to the same person. Vanessa Crane walked into my bridal suite in a cream sundress and gold sandals, holding a folder. Her hair was exactly the color of the highlights on the box called Honeyed Sand, which I know because she had posted about it in February and I had not been able to stop noticing it since. She was twenty-nine. She looked at me and smiled, and her smile was warm and awful, and behind her came Grant. He was in his tuxedo already, the one we had fitted in July, and he looked like a magazine ran him through a press and flattened him into something handsome and uncomplicated. He saw me and his face did the thing it did when he was about to ask me for something. A slight tightening around the mouth. A slow blink. "Elena," he said. "Before the ceremony, there's something Vanessa wanted to do. It's a tradition thing. A game." "A game," I said. Vanessa sat down on the bench at the foot of the bed, uninvited, and opened her folder. Inside was a grid. A nine-by-nine sudoku, printed on letter-size paper, clean and empty, its numbers waiting. "I heard you coach this," she said. "I've been doing puzzles since I was a kid, and I thought, you know, since Grant's got a whole wedding planned and all, it might be fun if we settle who wears the dress the old-fashioned way." Priya, across the room, said, "What?" I looked at the grid, and then at Grant, and then at the dress hanging on the door. "You want to compete for my wedding dress," I said. "Not compete," Vanessa said. "Just play. Whoever is faster wears it. Grant will write the puzzle so it's fair. He used to write them for me when we were kids, he's good at it. So it's not like I'm bringing in some ringer." I looked at Grant. He was looking at Vanessa, and his expression was soft and patient, the way it was when he explained to me why his mother could not possibly be asked to change the seating arrangement, or why his brother's wedding gift of a toaster had been a joke and not an insult. "Grant," I said. "You wrote puzzles for her." "When we were kids," he said. "It's not a thing." "Does everyone in this room know I'm a competitive sudoku coach," I said. "Because usually when someone wants to play against me, there's a league involved." Vanessa laughed, that laugh, and drummed her fingers on the grid. "Come on. You're not scared, are you? You've been doing this for years. I'm a beginner. It would be embarrassing for me to lose to a beginner, and it would be embarrassing for the person who loses to admit it. So it's fun either way." Grant said, "Elena. It's forty seconds. It's a game. Do it for the ceremony." Two hundred guests were waiting downstairs. My mother was smoking in a stairwell. My photographer was setting up his tripod under the trellis I had chosen because of the light. I sat down across from Vanessa Crane and said, "Fine. Let's play."