Chapter 16

Eleanor's head appeared. "I was wondering if you could help me choose something to wear tomorrow." Two gowns over one arm, expression deliberately light. "I don't know which one says my almost-daughter-in-law is absolutely going to win this thing."

Lily looked at the gowns. She looked at Eleanor's carefully neutral expression. She crossed the room in three steps and wrapped her arms around her, and Eleanor held on, and the phone and her father and the Ashford name and everything that went with it all receded to somewhere that didn't reach her here.

"The blue," she said, into Eleanor's shoulder. "The blue one, definitely."

The competition was held in a grand exhibition hall on the edge of the Marais. Julian sat in the third row with Eleanor and Robert and squeezed Eleanor's hand every time something on the runway was Lily's work, which Eleanor bore with dignity.

She was backstage, adjusting the final drape of the last gown, when the floor began to move.

It started as a tremor — the kind you felt in your feet before your brain had parsed what it was — and then became something else entirely. The ceiling fixtures swung. The rails of garments cascaded sideways. Someone in the audience screamed, and then everyone was screaming, and the managed chaos of backstage collapsed into actual chaos, and the lights went out.

She grabbed the final gown off the rack before it fell.

Outside, the square had become a landscape of dust and cracked masonry. Julian was there — she saw him before she saw anything else, crossing toward the building against the current of people running the other way, his face doing something uncontrolled and frightened that she had never seen on him before.

She emerged from a side exit with the gown under her arm.

He reached her in six steps. He didn't say anything — he just put both arms around her and held on, and she felt his heartbeat, still too fast, against her temple.

Eleanor appeared from somewhere with a gash on her palm and Lily's portfolio under her arm, which she'd apparently rescued from the chaos. "I wasn't going to leave it," Eleanor said, when Lily stared. "You worked too hard."

Lily laughed. She couldn't help it. It came out wet.

Damian was there too — she saw him at the edge of the square, holding flowers that had been slightly crushed in the chaos. He was looking at her. She looked back. He was very still. She watched him see Julian's arms around her, watch her turn toward Julian's shoulder rather than away from it. She watched his face accept something.

He nodded, once. A small, private gesture.

Then he set the flowers down on a nearby wall and walked away.

She looked after him for a moment. Then she looked at the gown — intact, miraculously — and at Eleanor's bruised palm, and at Julian who was still holding her wrist with one hand as if he might not be quite done with the holding-on.

It's all right, she thought, to no one in particular. Everything counts. Everything was real. And it's all right.

One year later, Paris.

The chapel at the end of the Rue de Rivoli was small and old and slightly crooked, the kind of place that looked like it had witnessed everything without being impressed by any of it. It was full.

Julian stood at the top of the aisle and was, for possibly the first time in her memory of knowing him, visibly nervous. He was gripping his cufflinks and pretending not to. Robert caught Lily's eye from the front pew and made a small you should see his face gesture.

The doors opened.

She walked in. She was wearing the charcoal-blue.

Julian looked at her and forgot about the cufflinks.

She reached the front and he did not wait for the ceremony to proceed in the ordained fashion. He went down on one knee right there, in front of everyone, and took her hand.

"I've been a coward twice in my life," he said. His voice was not entirely steady. "Once when I should have said something and didn't. And once when I should have told you the truth and couldn't." He tightened his hand on hers. "I'm not interested in being a coward a third time. So — in front of everyone — will you marry me? Properly. On purpose. With full information."

She looked at him. At the chapel and the light and Eleanor crying in the second row and Robert pretending not to also cry.

"Yes," she said. "Obviously yes. Get up."

He got up. He laughed. She laughed too.

Outside the chapel windows, Paris was ordinary and irreplaceable, and the afternoon light was the kind that makes everything look like it might last.