CHAPTER NINE: NOT MYSELF
1119 Words
The makeup artist has been in my room for over an hour, and she still hasn’t once called me by my real name.
“Ms. Amelia, tilt your chin up for me,” she says, dabbing something cool along my jaw, and I do it without thinking now, the way you learn a reflex after enough repetition. It didn’t used to be automatic. The first few times, I actually turned to look for my sister before remembering the room was empty and the name was mine now, borrowed and stitched on.
That was the story the family put out, in the end. Amelia Hart was simply away visiting family in another city in the days before the wedding, overwhelmed, needing space, and returned quietly to marry Damien in a small, private ceremony the public only saw photographs of afterward. Clean. Simple. Nothing to investigate.
Nobody outside this house knows there were ever two of us in that story.
I watch myself become her in the mirror, foundation smoothing over the small mole near my jaw that Amelia never had, my eyebrows shaped a little sharper, my hair styled the way hers always fell, loose curls instead of my usual low bun. By the time the artist finishes, I don’t recognize the woman looking back at me. She’s beautiful, poised, exactly the kind of woman a room like tonight’s expects to see.
She isn’t me.
“You look stunning,” the artist says, stepping back to admire her work. “Mr. Blackwood is a lucky man.”
I don’t correct her. I never do anymore.
I slip into the dress waiting on the bed, deep emerald, fitted in a way that makes me stand differently just to accommodate it, shoulders back, spine straight, a posture that isn’t mine either. Everything about tonight belongs to someone else’s name.
I make my way downstairs slowly, careful in heels I’m still not used to, and find the car already waiting outside, engine humming low in the evening air.
Damien is already seated inside when the driver opens my door.
I climb in beside him, arranging the dress around my legs, bracing myself the way I always do now for whatever cold, clipped thing he’ll say first.
He doesn’t say anything at first.
I glance over, and he’s looking at me, really looking, the kind of look he doesn’t usually let last this long. His eyebrows lift slightly, and something happens to his face that I’ve never once seen happen before.
He smiles.
Not the careful, practiced almost smile he gives at dinners, not the small flicker at the corner of his mouth I’ve learned to catch out of the corner of my eye. An actual smile, brief and unguarded, there before he seems to realize he’s letting it show.
“What,” I say, suddenly very aware of my own hands in my lap.
“Nothing.” He looks away first, out the window, jaw tightening like he’s annoyed at himself for something. “You look good tonight.”
I stare at him. In three weeks of marriage, he has never once told me I look good. He’s told me I look appropriate. He’s told me I look presentable, adequate, ready. He has never once used the word good like it meant something to him personally, rather than something the evening required of me.
“Thank you,” I say carefully, unsure if I’m imagining the shift in the air between us.
“It’s not a compliment,” he says quickly, too quickly. “It’s an observation. You need to look a certain way tonight. You do. That’s all I meant.”
“Sure.”
“I mean it, Ava.”
“You called me Ava,” I say quietly.
He goes still.
We both know what that means. In this car, with tonight’s driver possibly listening, with the whole evening ahead built entirely on the name that isn’t mine, saying my real one out loud is its own small, dangerous thing.
“Don’t do that again,” I say, gentler than I mean to. “Not tonight. Someone might hear.”
“I know.” His voice is quiet now, stripped of its usual edge. “I forgot, for a second.”
“You forgot.”
“Yes.” He looks at me again, and there’s something almost raw in it, something I don’t have a name for yet. “It happens more than I’d like it to.”
I don’t know what to do with that, so I look down at my hands instead, at the ring that isn’t mine either, sitting cold and heavy on my finger.
“Does it bother you,” I ask. “Saying her name to me all night. Watching me answer to it.”
He’s quiet a moment, considering the question with more care than I expect.
“Yes,” he says finally. “More than I thought it would.”
“Why.”
“Because you’re not her.” He says it simply, like it’s the most obvious fact in the world, though I’ve never once heard him say it out loud before. “I keep having to remind myself of that in rooms full of people who think you are.”
Something tightens in my chest, warm and unbearable all at once.
“I don’t know how to feel about that,” I admit.
“Neither do I,” he says, and for once, there’s no coldness in it at all, just something tired and honest, a man who has spent three weeks pretending too, in his own way. “I wasn’t expecting to have to keep reminding myself.”
The car slows outside the Kensington house, lights spilling gold across the driveway, guests already arriving in twos and threes ahead of us.
He doesn’t move to get out right away.
“For tonight,” he says, “you’re Amelia. I know that. I’ll say the name. I’ll play the part.” He looks at me one more time before the driver opens the door, something steady and quiet passing between us that has nothing to do with the performance waiting outside. “But I’ll know the truth the whole time I’m saying it.”
“That’s not nothing,” I say.
“No,” he agrees. “I suppose it isn’t.”
The door opens. The noise of the party spills in, bright and waiting. He steps out first, offering his hand the way he always does for the cameras, and for the first time, I take it without feeling like I’m only performing something too.
- Writer
