None of it helped. The insecurity was not responsive to my management, because it was not actually about me. It was about Ashley and something she had never learned to give herself.
I was genuinely happy when she met Trevor. He was stable and kind and seemed to see her clearly, and for a while the competitive edge between us softened. When she asked me to be her maid of honor, I said yes without hesitation. I hoped the shared project might rebuild some of what we had lost.
What it actually did was give her family proximity to me for six months of wedding planning, which gave them six months to demonstrate, in escalating ways, what they had always actually believed about the balance between my needs and Ashley’s.
The dress incident came about three months before the wedding. At the boutique fitting, I emerged from the dressing room in a simple dusty rose gown with a sweetheart neckline and the owner clasped her hands and said it was beautiful, that the color worked with my complexion and hair. Ashley burst into tears. She said I always had to be the center of attention. My mother, from her chair in the corner, said gently that Melanie would find something less flattering.
Less flattering. Her exact words.
I put on a boxy, high-necked style that washed me out and made my shoulders look narrow and my neck look long in the wrong way, and Ashley immediately declared it perfect.
Two weeks before the wedding, at the bachelorette weekend at a vineyard resort, Ashley ran her fingers through my hair and said she had always been jealous of it, that Trevor mentioned it all the time. She said it reminded him of an ex-girlfriend, with the particular brightness of someone delivering news they believe will wound.
That night I overheard her on the balcony with our mother.
Everyone will be looking at her walking down the aisle with that hair, Ashley said. She’ll steal my spotlight just by existing.
I slipped back inside before they could find me. I lay awake in my resort bed and thought about the word just. Just by existing. As if my existence were the problem. As if the solution to Ashley’s insecurity was my continued erasure.
