When the last attendee finally departed, Grace sank into a white leather sofa near the front of the gallery and kicked off her ballet flats. Melvin flopped into the sofa beside her. “Long night?”
“Overwhelming.” She glanced at him. “Thank you, Melvin. You did a lovely job on the exhibit. I hope by the end, we sell enough to cover the cost of production.”
“You can’t be serious, Grace.” His sharp features twisted into incredulity. “You sold several pieces, and I expect we’ll see more next week.”
“How many?”
“Four tonight. Interest in three more. To move thirty percent of a showing as a result of a single event—that’s almost unheard of.”
“Even so, considering the prices we discussed—” She broke off at the look on his face. “What?”
“I might have revised the price list since you last looked at it.” He handed her a printed white sheet.
Grace scanned it. Five thousand pounds? Eight thousand? Impossible. “Who in the world would pay that? It’s mad!”
“Apparently plenty of buyers disagreed. That’s far below market rate for a one-off print by someone of your renown, simply because you wanted to raise money for the charity. Of course, it didn’t hurt that your editor friend was talking you up. She’s a better saleswoman than I could have been.”
Grace put down the price list. If the other sales came through, even considering the cost of production and Melvin’s cut, the exhibition would raise forty or fifty thousand pounds. It was hard to feel as if she wasn’t doing enough, knowing the kind of good that money could do in a developing country. “Thank you for pushing me to do this, Melvin. It felt good. And Aidan would be happy to know that the money is going to benefit those who truly need it.”
“Go home, Grace. Have a glass of wine and savor the moment.” Melvin stood and retrieved his keys to unlock the front door. “I’d offer to call you a cab, but I think someone might have beat me to it.” He nodded his head toward the street, where Ian leaned casually against a waiting taxi.
Melvin practically propelled her out of the gallery, locking the glass door behind her. Ian straightened immediately and enfolded her in his arms. He buried his face into the side of her hair, his lips near her ear. “I’m so incredibly proud of you, Grace.”
She soaked up his warmth and his compliment for a minute. “See me home, then?”
He took her face in his hands and kissed her, then opened the cab’s door for her. Grace slid into the car, a strange feeling of contentment stealing over her. When Ian climbed in beside her, she sighed and leaned against him.
“Successful night?” he murmured.
“Very. It’s what I needed, I think. To put the past to rest. To move on.” She felt the sudden thread of tension winding through him, even though he said nothing. “I’m going to call Jean-Auguste again tomorrow.”
The tension melted. “And then a wedding date?”
“And then a wedding date.” She smiled up at him in the dark, her heart suddenly full. “Marry me?”
“Yes. Always yes.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Jean-Auguste didn’t answer his mobile on Saturday.
Or Sunday.
Or Monday.
On Tuesday, Grace couldn’t deny that her tiny niggle of concern had grown to full-blown worry. It wasn’t unusual to be out of mobile coverage for a few days, but the work flow of modern photographers usually meant downloading and postprocessing photos each night, then emailing them off to their editors. Even the photographers like Grace, who liked to linger over their work before culling their choices for submission, never went more than a few days out of contact.
Grace sat down at her laptop and fired off a few quick emails to editors that both she and Jean-Auguste had worked with recently, men she’d be more inclined to call friends than colleagues. If they’d heard from him, she’d know by the end of the day.
“Are you ready?”
Grace looked up from the screen to where Asha stood, a trench coat over her blouse and trousers, her handbag over one shoulder. “What?”
“For your appointment at the bridal salon. You didn’t forget, did you?”
“No, of course not.” Grace closed the laptop with a snap, then reached for her own bag, glad that she’d already dressed. “I’m ready to go.”
But her mind wasn’t on the parade of white dresses the consultant brought out in the posh Westminster shop; it was half a world away. When Asha caught Grace checking her email on her mobile for the fourth time, she pulled her aside into one of the lushly upholstered changing cubicles.
“Grace, what’s going on? Your mind is clearly not on wedding gowns. Are you having second thoughts?”
“About marrying Ian? No, of course not!” Grace sighed, then told Asha her worries about Jean-Auguste in barely more than a whisper. It was not exactly the kind of topic she wanted to voice around a handful of glowing, blissfully innocent brides.
“Surely you’re just being paranoid,” Asha said, but a note of concern had crept into her voice too. “Maybe he took a week off to sit on the beach in Bora-Bora.”
“Maybe. Probably. You’re right. I’m just anxious to set a wedding date. He’s all we’re waiting for now.”
“Well, stop worrying. All will go off as planned—if we can get you focused on the dress for a few minutes. You know it will be weeks before another slot opens up here.”
So Grace wrestled her mind back to the dresses, all of which were too full or too sparkly or too … wedding-like. “I don’t know, Ash. All these frills are the reason I don’t wear dresses in the first place.”
“Can we see something simpler?” Asha asked Madeline, the perfectly coiffed blonde bridal consultant. “Think along the lines of vintage Halston, not Marchesa. And stop trying to cover her tattoos. Her fiancé loves them.”
“Ah! I know just the thing.” The woman brightened and hurried off with renewed enthusiasm.
“Should I be scared?” Grace asked.
“Not at all. Have I ever been wrong?” Asha grinned at Grace’s dubious look. “Don’t answer that.”
When the consultant came back with something that resembled nothing more than a white pleated sheet, Grace said, “I’m trusting you, Asha.”
“Hey, it wasn’t my pick. I’ll wait out here.”
Grace let Madeline help her into the dress, refusing to look in the changing-room mirror, then walked to the dais amidst a swish of fabric.
Asha gasped and covered her mouth. “Oh, Grace!”
“That bad?”
“Just look.”
Grace stepped onto the round platform and froze. For the first time, her heart gave a little twist at the sight of herself in a white dress. “I look—”
“Stunning.” Asha came up behind her and made her do a full turn. “This is the one.”
Grace could only gape. It looked like 1970s couture in white—all soft, draped chiffon that skimmed her body and made her look like some sort of ancient goddess. The gathered front was caught up in a high collar like a halter, the waist cinched by a simple ribbon. And the rest … simply didn’t exist. The back, shoulders, most of the sides were left bare to show every last bit of her body art.
She felt daring and exposed and … like a bride.
“I’m really doing this,” she whispered as the slow build of excitement welled up and spilled over.
Asha hugged her. “You really are.”
And then Grace looked at the price tag. “It’s how much?”
“Don’t look at that. You can afford it. It’s symbolic, Grace. A new life.”
Asha was right. It was. She looked at the bridal consultant. “What now?”
“This dress takes approximately eight to ten weeks to arrive. When is your wedding date?”
Grace glanced at Asha again. “We haven’t set one. And it might be sooner than that.”
Madeline’s smile fell, clearly seeing a sale slipping through her fingers. “You’re sample size, so if it comes d
own to that—”
“Can you just write down all the details for her?” Asha asked quietly.
As soon as the consultant disappeared, Asha gave her another squeeze. “Okay, so we have just enough time for tea, and then I have to go meet Jake.” Her eyes softened. “You’re going to be a beautiful bride, Grace.”
And oddly enough, Grace agreed.
Grace floated through the next four hours, first her tea with Asha, then wandering Westminster streets with a freeness she’d not felt in years. Who knew that all it took to turn her into a puddle of mush was a couture wedding gown? But not just the gown, she admitted to herself. It was the image of walking down the aisle in that gown toward Ian, while he watched her with the same sort of awe James had displayed as Andrea approached him. The promise of forever.
She still wore a stupid grin when she knocked on Ian’s door, a paper bag under her arm. “Did someone order Chinese?”
Ian swept the food out of her hands onto the foyer table and kissed her with a thoroughness that did nothing to mitigate her dreamy state. He pulled back and looked into her eyes. “Someone is in a very good mood.”
“Someone found a wedding dress.”
“Am I allowed to see it?”
“Of course not! It would be bad luck. But it is stunning. It would have to be—to get me daydreaming about an actual dress.” She grabbed the food off the foyer table and took it to the dining room, where she began to unpack the little paper cartons. “I got us hot-and-sour soup, shrimp with lobster sauce, and … What? Why are you looking at me like that?”
He caught her around the waist and kissed her again. “Because I love you. And if you weren’t so set on that gown, I would drag you down to the register office tomorrow.”
“It’s a good thing it’s one amazing gown, or I might take you up on that.”
“Are you sure I can’t convince you otherwise?”
His convincing took the form of tiny, light kisses along her jaw. Just as she was about to tell him he was being a little too persuasive, her mobile buzzed in her jacket pocket. “Hello?”
“Grace?” A man’s American-accented voice came through.
Grace stiffened, and Ian stopped what he was doing, his fingers tightening on her waist. She pulled the phone away to check the incoming number. “Jim. You got my email. Do you have news about Jean-Auguste?”
“Grace—”
The hesitation in his voice amped up her heart rate and slammed her with a wall of dread. “He’s okay, right? You’ve heard from him.” Ian’s arm slipped around her, but she barely noticed the support. “Jim, just tell me!”
“He went missing about three weeks ago in Kirkuk.”
“But that doesn’t mean—”
“There’s a video, Grace.”
Those three words—there’s a video—knocked the remaining wind from her lungs. The mobile slipped from her hands and clattered to the floor. She lowered herself to a seat with trembling legs, vaguely aware of Ian picking up her phone and murmuring quiet words into the handset.
From across the room, the television drew her with an irresistible pull. She snatched up the remote, clicked on the first news channel she came to. The headline banner splashed blood red across the screen, but before she could glean any information, Ian grabbed the remote from her hand. “No. You don’t want that in your head. Trust me.”
“But I have to know! There has to have been a mistake—”
“Grace, sweetheart, he’s gone. I’m so sorry.”
She stared at him for the longest moment before the words sank in. And then came the grief, a crushing tidal wave dragging her under. “No, I don’t … I can’t …”
Numbly, she became aware of Ian’s arms around her, his hands stroking her hair as she cried great gulping sobs, sounds far more animal than human. He murmured quiet words of reassurance and held her as her emotions poured out. Over and over she thought, It can’t be true. I don’t believe it. It’s a mistake.
And for the third time in her life, because of this work they felt compelled to do, her world stopped spinning.
It must have been hours. It felt like hours because she couldn’t remember how it had gotten this late, the bit of sky she could see through the windows a deep navy. Ian had turned on some soft music and covered her with a blanket and pressed a cup of tea into her hands, but for all that, she still trembled with a bone-deep cold.
She was in shock. She knew she had to be, because she was thinking slowly, reacting like she was underwater. Ian sat down on the sofa beside her and rubbed her arms, his face concerned.
“Grace, I’m so sorry.” He pressed a kiss to her temple and slipped an arm around her.
She sank into him. “I can’t believe he’s gone. I knew something was wrong. I felt it. Why didn’t I watch the news? He’s been missing for three weeks, and I didn’t even know it.” Three weeks in which she had been focused on herself and Ian and her own happiness while one of the people she loved most in the world was being held captive. Probably tortured. Brutally killed.
“You couldn’t have done anything, Grace. It seems they weren’t even sure he was missing.”
He was right, but it didn’t assuage the guilt. She closed her eyes, the grief falling heavily over her like a curtain.
Ian took her cup and set it on the table, then repositioned her on the sofa so she could lie against a stack of pillows with her feet in his lap. “Just try to sleep now, Grace. It’s the best thing. I’ll be here when you wake up.”
She wanted to protest, but her eyes were too heavy and his hands on her feet were too relaxing, and despite her best efforts to put the words together, they got lost on the way to her lips. So she slept.
She woke with a gasp at the first grenade blast, clutching her surroundings like a drowning man grasping for land. Her heart pounded in her ears, gradually overtaking the ringing that trailed from her dreams. She was in London. Safe.
Ian was sprawled asleep in an armchair by the sofa, his reading glasses dangling from his fingers, an open book resting on his chest. A quick look at the clock above the television said it was just after two in the morning.
It had only been a dream.
Except her throat felt raw and her eyes ached and her cheeks were stiff, as if she’d been crying. Only then did she remember Jean-Auguste. Not everything had been a dream after all.
The wave of grief crashed over her, grinding her beneath its power, stealing her breath. She clutched her head in her hands and willed the nausea to pass, but it didn’t help. She was drowning. She had to get away. Her feet thrust into her shoes by the sofa. Her fingers took up her phone and handbag automatically, and the frantic thrum of her heartbeat propelled her out the door.
Down on the pavement, the damp air clung to her skin and slowly peeled away the fingers of panic from her lungs. In the blue-black of the London night, she could finally breathe, even if it made her feel more acutely the hole in her universe left by Jean-Auguste’s death.
She had been a fool. She had somehow thought that removing herself from her career would make her immune to tragedy. It was a child’s perspective, the hope that staying huddled beneath a blanket in her bed would keep the monsters away. But even as Jean-Auguste had encouraged her to escape, he’d stayed in danger. He’d been mistreated and then killed before a silent, watching world, while she tried on wedding dresses and dreamed of a new life, pretending a new start was hers to claim.
Grace’s phone buzzed in her pocket, but she ignored it. No doubt it was Ian, but she didn’t have it in her to respond. There were no words to express how she felt. No way to say that she had been shaken to her core, that the once-gleaming future she’d seen stretched out before her now lay beneath a fog. It sounded like madness, even to her, so she ignored his increasingly urgent calls and texts. Instead she let her angry strides carry her down the pavement, while the digital camera she always kept stashed in her purse found its way into her hand.
When she stumbled into a twenty-four-hour diner i
n Soho just after sunrise, her camera’s memory card was as full as her phone’s voice-mail box. She numbly placed her order and claimed a corner booth where she wouldn’t have to make eye contact with the living. Instead she scrolled through the shots she’d taken as she wandered the night-shrouded city. They were the inverse of the London she had so far experienced: in place of the flower markets and cathedrals was Soho’s red-light district and the late-night bars. Her London in place of Ian’s—flipped upside down, inside out, positive to negative.
She paused before an image she didn’t remember taking: a tarted-up teenager with a cigarette dangling from her lips, mascara tracking down her cheeks as if she’d paused her crying in order to step out for a smoke. Something in the girl’s pained yet vacant stare raised an answering twinge inside her. However much she wished it weren’t true, Grace had far more in common with this Soho party girl than Ian’s Westminster elite.
Grace pulled out her mobile and sent a message to a number she hadn’t used in years. Just as she had expected, she got an answering text within minutes.
Come over at 9. I’ll open the shop early. Bring coffee.
Chapter Thirty
Ian awoke to the sound of silence. He didn’t need to look to know that Grace was gone. The blanket she had been sleeping beneath had been thrown back, her shoes were missing, and the table that had held her handbag stood empty. Still, he checked the other rooms in the flat, unsurprised when they came up empty.
She had probably gone back to Asha’s and not wanted to wake him. If that were the case, she’d not thank him for rousing her if she were already home in bed. He dialed anyway.
After a few rings, the call went to voice mail. He sent a text message—Grace, where are you?—and pretended that the worry wasn’t building inside him. She had been distraught, disoriented by her grief. That was hardly a state in which to be wandering the London streets at 2:00 a.m.
London Tides: A Novel (The MacDonald Family Trilogy Book 2) Page 24