Something in His Pocket

Six hours before I married Griffin Hale, I found my father standing in front of the hallway mirror, staring at nothing.

"Dad?"

He startled, folding something small into his palm. "Just checking my tie."

His tie was already straight. I let it go — brides don't have time to chase ghosts on their wedding day, not with a hairdresser waiting and my mother, Verity, calling my name from the kitchen like the house was on fire.

By nine, the house smelled like hairspray and coffee. My mother fussed over the veil until I begged her to sit down. My father disappeared twice — once to "get air," once to make a phone call he took outside, low-voiced, pacing the driveway like a man rehearsing an apology.

"Who was that?" I asked when he came back in.

"Work," he said. Emory Ashcroft did not lie well. I'd known that since I was seven and he told me the dog had "gone to live on a farm."

I should have pushed. Instead I let my best friend zip me into the dress, and I watched my reflection become someone else — someone luckier than the girl who used to eat cereal for dinner during her parents' worst years. Griffin had rebuilt something in me I didn't know was broken. In four hours, I'd be his wife.

At eleven, I went looking for my father's jacket, wanting the small flask of whiskey he always carried for nerves. I found it in the inside pocket — and beside it, folded into quarters so many times the creases had gone soft as cloth, a torn corner of a photograph.

A young woman's face. Dark hair, a nervous smile, an old-fashioned floral dress. Someone I had never seen in my life.

I heard him coming up the stairs and shoved it back exactly as I'd found it, my heart going fast for no reason I could name.

"You ready, sweetheart?" he called.

"Almost," I said, and smiled at a stranger's face I couldn't stop thinking about.