The Last Walk-Through

"You're late," I said, not looking up from the clipboard. I didn't need to look up. I could hear Scott's keys jingling from the far side of the door, the way I'd been hearing them for four years.

"Twenty minutes," he said. "Twenty minutes late. That's a new record, isn't it?"

"It's not a record. Two weeks ago you hit forty."

I made a mark on the clipboard, a little check next to nothing, really, just a check so my hands had a job. "The Henderson fitting starts at nine tomorrow and this mannequin still looks like it got dressed in the dark."

"Then maybe you should turn the lights on."

I finally looked up. Scott was leaning in the doorway with his jacket half off one shoulder, watching me. He does that. He's always done that. He watches the way other people talk, like he's listening with his eyes, which sounds insane when I write it down but it's true and I'm sticking with it.

"I'm adjusting a train," I said. "The hem is supposed to break right there and it breaks about four inches past there. Do you see four inches anywhere on this mannequin that says break?"

"I see a woman who has been at work for eleven hours and is talking to a mannequin."

"The mannequin listens better than you do."

"That's fair," he laughed, and came in. The door clicked shut behind him and the little brass bell over it didn't even ring properly, just gave up with a dull clonk. That bell has been dying since before I took this job.

So here's the setup, for anyone just wandering in. My name is Candace, I'm twenty-eight, and I plan weddings for people with more money than patience. I've been doing it for five years, two of them at this salon, which is the nice one downtown with the pearl-white gowns in the windows that look, after hours, like a room full of very calm ghosts. Scott is twenty-nine. He does sound for a living, concerts mostly, which means he works nights and I work nights and we meet each other mostly in hallways and parking lots. We've been together four years. We met at Danny and Mae's wedding in 2021, where I was working, actually, headset on, clipboard out, and he walked up to the head table and asked me where the bathroom was and then stood there while I gave him directions to three different bathrooms because I couldn't remember which one was open. That was it. That was our whole meet-cute, and somehow it stuck.

And Leila. Leila is my junior planner, she's twenty-seven, she's been with me two years, and she is the quietest person I have ever met. She notices everything and says maybe a quarter of it, which makes her either my best employee or a very patient spy. I've decided not to worry about it.

"Where's Leila?" Scott asked.

"In the back, doing inventory, or hiding, one of the two." I pulled a pin out of the pincushion on my wrist and jabbed it into the train. "She's doing the Henderson prep with me. The whole thing. Veils, shoes, the seating chart, which I have redone four times because the mother of the bride emailed me at two in the morning."

"Four times?"

"Four. The fifth draft has the mother at a table in the parking lot. I'm sending it tonight and seeing if anyone reads it."

He laughed at that, a real laugh, and came over and stood next to the mannequin with me. And then he just looked. Not at the gown. At me. At my hands working the fabric, at my face while I squinted at the hem. It's the strangest thing, being looked at like that by someone you've known forever. You'd think it would stop landing. It doesn't. It landed like a familiar hand on the back of my neck, and I felt it all down my spine, and I pretended I didn't.

"You've got a pin stuck to your sleeve," he said.

"I know. It's decorative."

"It's very chic."

"Thank you. I'll bill the salon."

Leila's head appeared around the rack of gowns, and I want it noted that she did not look surprised to see Scott, because Leila is never surprised by anything. "The caterer emailed again," she said. "The one with the mushroom situation."

"The mushroom situation can wait until tomorrow."

"He says it's urgent."

"Everything is urgent with that man. He once called me about napkins during my grandmother's funeral." I waved the clipboard at her. "Tell him I'll call in the morning."

"Will you actually call in the morning?"

"I will absolutely lie to you right now and say yes."

Leila smiled at that, a small smile, she rations them, and said, "I'm going to the back room for the fitting tape anyway. The long one. The short one snapped."

"Take your time," I said. "Take all the time. Take a nap back there if you want."

She went. And the salon went quiet in that specific after-hours way, the HVAC humming, the mirrors catching the work lights, the mannequins standing there in their gowns like they were all waiting for somebody to pick them. Scott dropped his jacket over a chair and sat down in one of the little customer chairs, the ones designed to make you look good from every angle and sit comfortably for exactly six minutes.

"Take your time doing what?" he asked.

"Finishing this train. Then I'm changing out of this sample gown, because I've been wearing it since three, and it has a corset back and my ribs hurt."

I'd put the sample on over my own clothes, which is something we do when a bride is between sizes and needs to see a silhouette on an actual body instead of a hanger. It's a great trick and I recommend it to no one, because a size eight bridal gown does not go on over a size eight person's clothing without some shoving. I'd been walking around all evening like a parade float.

Scott didn't say anything while I worked the last pins. He just sat there and watched, and I could feel it, the whole time, this steady warm weight on the side of my face. And here's the part I keep circling back to. I've been going through the motions for a while now. Not with Scott exactly, more like with everything. Weddings all day, every day, love as a product, the word bride so many times it stopped being a word. Somewhere in there I stopped feeling watched. Scott loves me, I never doubted that, but love after four years is a comfortable chair, and comfortable chairs don't stare.

He was staring.

I caught him in the three-way mirror, actually. That's how I noticed. I was looking at the train in the glass and there he was behind me in the middle panel, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, and his eyes were not on the dress. They were on me, on my waist where the corset nipped in, on the bit of neck above the neckline, and when I looked up into the mirror he didn't look away. He didn't do the guilty little glance-dart that people do when they get caught. He just held it.

And I held it back. Longer than I meant to. Long enough that it stopped being an accident and started being a thing we were doing.

"Well," I said, and my voice came out about half its usual size.

"Well," he said.