The makeup chair was warm under me. The mirror in front was ringed with bulbs, and behind the bulbs, propped on a rolling cart, sat the small monitor I'd had Lacey wheel in.
Three thousand forty-two viewers.
The number sat in the top right corner like a scoreboard. Below it, the screen tiled into squares — a wall of faces, each one a connected guest, each one watching me get married.
Second row. Third box.
Ada Calloway. My grandmother. Her chin was tipped down, her mouth a little open, the iPad angled wrong so I could see more of her ear than her eye. My cousin's thumb hovered at the edge of the frame.
"She's dozing," I said to nobody.
"Sorry?" The makeup artist — Renata, hired off Lacey's shortlist — leaned in with a wand of gloss.
"Nothing. The light hits her funny."
Renata smiled and dabbed my lower lip. Then she frowned at the tube. "This isn't the shade. Hang on. Ninety seconds, I've got the right one in the kit downstairs."
"Go."
She went.
The door clicked. The room exhaled.
I sat very still. The monitor hummed. Cam Six was on the lower split, the hallway shot, creeping forward on Tomas's Steadicam toward the door of this room. The door I'd left cracked ten centimeters wide.
The hallway mic picked up a laugh first.
Female. Low. Throaty.
Sienna.
Then a second voice, easy, amused.
"Knock it off."
Damon.
I lifted my eyes to the monitor. My hands stayed in my lap.
He'll push her off, I thought. He'll say her name like a warning, and she'll roll her eyes, and he'll come find me and tell me his maid of honor has lost her mind in a red dress.
The Steadicam crept another inch.
"Damon."
"Don't."
"Damon, look at me."
"I said don't."
Two seconds.
I counted them. One Mississippi. Two.
No scrape of a shoe pivoting away. No door opening. No "I have to go." Just breath, and fabric, and the small wet sound of a mouth.
"Tonight," Damon said.
His voice had dropped into the register he used in bed. I knew that register. I had a personal trademark on that register.
"Tonight what." Sienna, breathy.
"Tonight, after the toasts. After the cake. I'll deal with her. I'll tell her it's done."
"You said that in March."
"I'm saying it now. You hear me? After tonight, I'm divorcing her. We get through the day, and then it's over."
The viewer counter blinked.
3,042.
3,042.
Then the comment ticker, which had been chugging at maybe fifty a second, tipped.
Five hundred a second.
The numbers scrolled too fast to read. Faces in the grid leaned closer to their cameras. A woman in row four covered her mouth. A man in row six stood up and walked off-screen. Ada's box — Ada's box — jolted. A hand entered the frame. Not my cousin's hand. Somebody else's. Slapping the iPad. Slapping it again. Trying to wake her. Trying to turn it off. I couldn't tell which.
I watched my grandmother's box shake.
I did not move.
In the hallway, Sienna whispered something I didn't catch. Damon laughed, soft, the laugh he used to give me at three in the morning when I couldn't sleep.
I looked at the lipstick Renata had left on the vanity. The wrong shade. Too pink.
I picked it up.
I leaned toward the mirror. I parted my lips. I painted the lower one, corner to corner, in a single steady stroke. The color was wrong. It didn't matter. The line was clean.
I capped the tube.
I looked at my left hand.
The ring was a cushion-cut, two carats, financed across thirty-six months in Damon's name. I slid it off over the knuckle. It came easy. I had lost three pounds in the last week from nerves I'd called excitement.
My makeup bag sat open on the counter. I unzipped the inner pocket — the one with the spare bobby pins and a tampon and a folded twenty — and I dropped the ring in. I zipped it closed.
I checked the clock on the monitor.
Thirty-eight seconds, start to finish.
In the hallway, Damon was still talking.
I stood up.
My dress made the small expensive sound silk crepe makes when it remembers it cost six thousand dollars. I walked to the door. I did not look through the crack. I pulled it open the rest of the way, stepped into the corridor on the side opposite their voices, and turned left.
Tomas was at his post. The Steadicam was pointed away from me, toward the sound. His back was to me. He didn't see me leave the suite.
I walked.
Past the photo wall. Past the gift table. Down the curved staircase to the lobby level, one hand on the rail, the other holding the front of my skirt off the carpet.
The sign-in podium stood where I'd left it. Quarter inch to the left. Quarter inch back. Pen parallel to the spine.
The guest book was open to a fresh cream page. Three names so far, in three different inks.
I closed it.
I flipped it over.
The back cover was a smooth panel of bonded leather, the color of milk in coffee. I reached under the podium for the marker the calligrapher had left clipped to the underside. Black. Fine tip.
I uncapped it with my teeth.
I wrote one line on the back of the book.
I capped the marker. I set it down. I reached into my makeup bag — I'd carried it with me, I realized, the whole way down, looped over my wrist like a clutch — and I took out the ring. I placed it on top of the line I'd just written, dead center, the cushion-cut catching the chandelier.
I straightened the book. Quarter inch. Quarter inch.
The livestream camera mounted above the sign-in table watched me do it. Its little green light burned steady.
I didn't look up at it.
I lifted my skirt. I walked past the ballroom doors, past the kitchen pass, past a busser pushing a cart of champagne flutes who didn't recognize the bride without her bouquet. I found the staff corridor. I found the gray door at the end with the red EXIT sign humming above it.
I pushed the bar.
Outside, the loading dock smelled like cardboard and exhaust. A delivery van idled. The driver was scrolling his phone. He glanced up, saw a woman in a wedding dress, looked back down.
I let the door fall shut behind me.
Inside, on a cream leather guest book at a podium nobody was watching, my line waited in black marker, weighted by two carats.
And upstairs, Cam Six kept rolling on an empty bridal suite, the door drifting wider on its hinge, ten centimeters becoming twenty becoming thirty.
Three thousand forty-two boxes watched the room I wasn't in.
The first guest to walk through the lobby would be the first to lift that ring.
