The needle slipped through silk like a whispered secret, each stitch a prayer I’d been weaving for six months. French seams, hand‑rolled hems, seed pearls I’d sewn one by one until my fingers bled and my eyes burned under the lamplight. The dress spread across my dining table like captured moonlight—ivory silk charmeuse that had cost me three weeks’ grocery money, but worth every sacrifice for Halie’s wedding day.
At fifty-two, my hands weren’t as steady as they’d been when I’d sewn my own wedding dress thirty years ago, but they were wiser. Each pleat held decades of muscle memory, every dart shaped by the ghosts of countless alterations I’d done to make ends meet after Toby died. This dress wasn’t just fabric and thread.
It was my love letter to my only daughter, the child I’d raised alone after her father’s heart attack when she was twelve. The morning sun painted golden squares across my kitchen floor as I wrapped the gown in acid‑free tissue paper, the way my mother had taught me to preserve precious things. My reflection in the hallway mirror showed a woman grown thin from worry and lean from years of stretching every dollar, but my eyes held the quiet satisfaction of work well done.
Today, Halie would see what her mother’s hands had created in the silence of countless nights. The Fairmont Hotel rose before me like a wedding cake made of brick and marble, its valet parking alone costing more than I spent on groceries in a month. Halie had chosen this venue—or rather, her future mother‑in‑law had chosen it.
Despite knowing my modest teacher’s pension couldn’t stretch to such extravagance, I’d offered to help with the flowers instead, to do something within my means. But Mia Cox had smiled that paper‑thin smile of hers and said, “Oh, don’t worry about contributing, Bri. We’ve got everything handled.”
The bridal suite hummed with expensive chaos.
Mia commanded a team of professionals like a general positioning troops: a makeup artist with a kit that cost more than my monthly rent, a hair stylist whose scissors moved with surgical precision, and a photographer whose camera clicked constantly, capturing every manufactured moment of candid preparation. Halie sat in the center of it all like a porcelain doll—beautiful and still—while strangers painted and pried and fussed over her. My daughter had always been lovely, but today she looked like someone else entirely—someone polished to a shine that reflected back only what others wanted to see.
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