“I’m making your dress!” says Danny, his eyes wide with shock. “Aren’t I? You promised me, Becky! We had an agreement!”
“The Vera Wang sounds perfect,” says Erin. “You have to have that.”
“I’d go for Richard Tyler,” says Tracy.
“What about the dress your mother was married in, though?” says Lisa. “Wouldn’t that be so romantic?”
“The Vera Wang would be divine,” says Erin determinedly.
“But how can you pass up your own mother’s wedding dress?” demands Lisa. “How can you set aside a whole family tradition like that? Becky, don’t you agree?”
“The point is to look good!” says Erin.
“The point is to be romantic!” retorts Lisa.
“But what about my dress?” comes Danny’s plaintive voice. “What about loyalty to your best friend? What about that, Becky?”
Their voices seem to be drilling into my head, and they’re all staring at me avidly, waiting for an answer… and with no warning I feel myself snap.
“I don’t know, OK?” I cry desperately. “I just… don’t know what I’m going to do!”
Suddenly I feel almost tearful — which is completely ridiculous. I mean, it’s not like I won’t have a dress.
“Becky, I think we need to have a little chat,” says Christina, giving me a shrewd look. “Erin, clear all this up, please, and apologize to Carla, would you? Becky, come with me.”
We go into Christina’s smart beige suede office and she closes the door. She turns round — and for an awful moment I think she’s going to yell at me. But instead she gestures for me to sit down and gives me a long, penetrating look through her tortoiseshell glasses.
“How are you, Becky?”
“I’m fine!”
“You’re fine. I see.” Christina gives a skeptical nod. “What’s going on in your life at the moment?”
“Nothing much,” I say brightly. “You know! Same old same old…”
“Wedding plans going all right?”
“Yes!” I say at once. “Yes! Absolutely no problems there.”
“I see.” Christina is silent for a moment, tapping her teeth with a pen. “You visited a friend in the hospital recently. Who was that?”
“Oh, yes. That was… a friend of Luke’s, actually. Michael. He had a heart attack.”
“That must have been a shock for you.”
For a moment I’m silent.
“Well… yes, I suppose it was,” I say at last, running a finger along the arm of my chair. “Especially for Luke. The two of them have always been really close, but they’d had a falling out, and Luke was already feeling really guilty. Then we got the call about Michael — I mean, if he’d died, Luke never would have been able to…” I break off and rub my face, feeling emotion rising. “And then of course, there’s all this tension between Luke and his mother at the moment, which doesn’t help. She completely used him. In fact, she more than used him, she abused him. He feels utterly betrayed by her. But he won’t talk to me about it.” My voice starts to tremble. “He won’t talk to me about anything at the moment. Not the wedding, not the honeymoon… Not even where we’re going to live! We’re being chucked out of our apartment, and we haven’t found anywhere else to go yet, and I don’t know when we’re even going to start looking…”
To my astonishment a tear starts trickling down the side of my nose. Where did that come from?
“But you’re fine, apart from that,” says Christina.
“Oh, yes!” I brush at my face. “Apart from that, everything’s great!”
“Becky!” Christina shakes her head. “This is no good. I want you to take some vacation days. You’re due some, anyway.”
“I don’t need a vacation!”
“I’d noticed you’ve been tense recently, but I had no idea it was this bad. It was only when Laurel talked to me this morning—”
“Laurel?” I say, taken aback.
“She’s worried too. She told me she thought you’d lost your sparkle. Even Erin has noticed it. She says she told you about a Kate Spade sample sale yesterday, and you barely looked up. This is not the Becky I hired.”
“Are you firing me?” I say dolefully.
“I’m not firing you! I’m worried about you. Becky, that’s some combination of events you just told me about. Your friend… and Luke… and your apartment…”