POV: Jasmine
The salon smelled like steamed silk and old wood, and the woman who ran it greeted us at the door with the practiced warmth of a person who had built a career on other people's most expensive afternoons.
Her name was Beatrice. She had a measuring tape around her neck and a small, kind face. She put a glass of cold water in my hand before she had said three words to me.
"The bride," she said, clasping her hands together. "Beautiful. Come, come. We have set five aside. I think we begin with the one you marked online."
I followed her toward the back. "Lead the way, Beatrice."
Nora squeezed my elbow on the way past the curtain. "I am about to be the most useful friend you have ever had. Prepare yourself."
"I am bracing," I told her, and she grinned like she meant it as a threat.
The first dress was the one I had said yes to from a photograph weeks before. I let Beatrice do the work. I closed my eyes the way I always closed my eyes when other people's hands were on me in a professional capacity — patient, polite, somewhere else.
When I opened them, the dress was on. I turned to the mirror.
It was beautiful. It is. Look at it.
I had not finished the thought when I heard the seam go.
A precise tear, low along the side of my ribs. Beatrice made a noise I had never heard a grown woman make in a public room. Nora's eyes went wide in the mirror.
Beatrice pressed both hands to her mouth. "Madonna mia —"
"It is fine," I said, before I had checked whether it was. "Beatrice. It is fine. Step back. Let me see."
I lifted my arm. The seam had opened from the underarm down the rib in a clean line, like the dress had decided on its own that it did not want to be worn.
I exhaled slowly through my nose. It is a dress. It is a dress.
"This was not the dress," I said, already reaching for the zipper. "Show me the next one."
The second was wrong before Beatrice had the buttons closed. Too tight at the bust, loose at the waist. The third had been called ivory in the catalog and was, in person, the colour of weak tea. The fourth was a silhouette I had specifically asked not to see — a heavy ballgown skirt that swallowed me to the collarbones.
By the fourth I was no longer reading my own face in the mirror. I was reading Nora's. She had stopped making encouraging sounds.
Beatrice smoothed the measuring tape between her fingers. "Number five?"
I nodded once. "Number five."
Number five fit.
It was a column of soft silk, simple, narrow at the waist, falling to the floor without fuss. It did not tear. It did not gap. It was the right colour. It was, by any reasonable standard, lovely.
It also did not move me.
I stood on the small carpeted box and looked at myself in the mirror and felt nothing in particular. The part of me that had wanted to cry at the sight of myself — that part was not in the room.
Nora tilted her head, careful. "It is beautiful, Jasmine."
"It is," I said, smoothing the silk at my hip.
She waited a beat. "Is it the one?"
"It is the one," I said. "It is beautiful, I like it. It fits. It will photograph well. We will not be back here tomorrow."
Beatrice clasped her hands. "I will pin the hem."
"Please do," I told her, and she knelt at my feet. Nora caught my eye in the mirror and did not say anything. She has noticed. She is not going to push. I loved her for it.
Then my phone rang on the velvet bench by the wall. The name on the screen pulled my professional self up out of my chest like a hand on a string. Finn.
"I have to take this," I told Beatrice. "Sorry. One second."
Beatrice waved a pin at me gently. "Of course, signora. Stay still."
I lifted the phone to my ear and stayed on the box. Standing very straight. The hem was full of pins.
"Finn," I said.
His voice came through warm, teasing. "Tell me you are somewhere with sun on you."
"I am standing on a box in a wedding salon getting pinned," I told him. "There is a window. There is, technically, sun."
He laughed. "Close enough. I will not keep you."
I heard him take a breath. The shift in his voice — lighter to working — was small enough that only someone who had spent years listening for it would have caught it.
"Two things," he said. "One is good. One is small but you should have it."
"Go ahead," I said, watching my own face in the mirror.
Finn's voice picked up speed, the way it did when he was proud of something. "I sat on Asher until he agreed to take the wedding out of business. I mean off. No calls, no docs, no quiet half-hours in the corner with his laptop. I am running everything from here. He fought me. I won."
"Thank you, Finn," I said, and meant it fully.
His voice softened. "He needs it. He will not say so. But he needs it."
"I know he does," I said.
"Second thing." His tone shifted again. "Jackson filed a formal request with the board this morning."
The words made a small cold place under my collarbone. Of course he did. Of course this week.
"Saying what?" I asked.
Finn read it back to me carefully. "Asking for limited voting rights on key company decisions during the period in which Liam is, quote, occupied with personal matters."
I let that sit. "He used that phrase."
Finn's voice went flat. "He used that phrase."
I let myself laugh — short, dry, unamused. "He could not even let me have a wedding."
"I have already blocked it procedurally," Finn said. "There is a clean rule on it and it does not need a vote. But I want a verbal confirmation from you, as majority shareholder, that you reject the request. One sentence. I will note time and date. It closes the file."
I looked at myself in the mirror. The dress that was fine. The pins along the hem. The small Italian woman at my feet. My friend on the velvet bench, watching me.
"As majority shareholder of Cadence," I said, evenly, "I reject Jackson Blackwood's request for voting rights on company decisions during the wedding period. Note it as you need to."
"Noted. Done. Filed," he said, and I heard the pen stop moving.
I shifted my weight on the box. "Anything else?"
"No," he said. "Go back to your dress. I am sorry I called."
"You are not sorry," I told him. "You did exactly what you should have done. Now eat something properly and sleep."
Finn's voice warmed again. "Yes, ma'am."
"I mean it, Finn," I said, gripping the phone tighter.
"I know you do," he answered quietly, and hung up first. He always hung up first when he was working.
I lowered the phone slowly and slid it into the pocket of the salon robe.
I had not stepped down from the box.
In the mirror, I caught Nora watching me. Her eyes had moved — from my face, to my shoulders, to the phone, to my face again.
A woman in a dress that was just fine. Shoulders already back in position. The small box under her feet not quite a pedestal and not quite the floor.
She did not say anything. She just looked at me, and let me see her looking.