His fiancée had agreed, not suggested or wanted.
See, Brittany had only met Lily twice, and both times she’d looked at my daughter as if she were a coffee stain on a white couch. But I swallowed it down.
“I’ll ask her,” I said.
Lily was over the moon! She ran in circles around the living room and then made me promise three times that it was real.
“Mommy, I get to wear a real dress? With petals?”
“Yes, baby.”
“And Daddy picked me?”
I told her yes because that night I believed it too.
After I confirmed Lily’s participation with Mark, our daughter started counting down the days on a paper chain taped to her bedroom door. Every evening, she practiced walking slowly down our hallway, a plastic basket full of silk petals in her hands, her chin up as she’d seen in a movie.Mommy,” Lily would whisper, peeking over her shoulder before asking what she’d repeat almost every night while practicing, “Do I look like a real princess?”
A new dress wasn’t in the budget. Not with rent, her gymnastics, and the dentist bill I was still chipping away at. So I bought a simple pink dress from the consignment shop and spent three weekends at the kitchen table sewing tiny pearls onto the bodice, one by one, while reruns played in the background.
