Hazel
The store room was Rossana's idea.
I was there when she told Ava. I was sitting on that upturned crate with my arms around my sister and my genuine tears in my hair and my heart genuinely breaking for her because I meant what I said — I love Ava and watching her fall apart in that small room was one of the hardest things I have witnessed. Both of those things are true simultaneously and I have stopped trying to make them contradict each other.
I heard every word of the plan.
The produce van. The east service gate. The canvas bag. Thursday evening. Aunt Margret.
I sat and listened to my mother lay it out in that precise certain voice and I held my sister and I cried real tears into her hair and I felt the plan form in my mind with the specific clean clarity of something that had been waiting for exactly this shape to arrive.
My mother had handed me the key.
She didn't know she was doing it. My mother thought she was helping Ava. My mother thought she was being a mother. Whatever Rossana's reasons were — and I had my own thoughts about Rossana's reasons that I kept carefully to myself — she believed in that moment that she was protecting her eldest daughter.
She had actually given her youngest daughter exactly what she needed.
I held Ava tighter and I let her feel my grief for her which was real and I let her feel my love for her which was also real and I made my decision in the same moment and I felt no contradiction between any of those things.
I was going to tell Varder where she was.
Not because I hated her.
Because he was supposed to be mine and she interfered with that, the bitch deserved to pay.
I spent the rest of that day being very careful.
I went about my duties with the focused efficiency of someone who had somewhere important to be and was making sure nobody knew it yet. I watched Ava move through the afternoon with the practiced invisible grace she had spent three years perfecting and I watched her not look at Simon and I watched Simon not look at her and I felt a flicker of something for her that I am going to call grief because it is the most accurate word available even if it sits uncomfortably next to everything else I was feeling.
She loved Simon. I knew that better than anyone. I had kept that secret for two years with the loyalty of a sister who understood what it cost her to trust someone with something that precious.
I kept it right up until it became inconvenient.
I watched her that afternoon and I knew she was thinking about the bag and the van and Thursday evening and Aunt Margret and I let her think it because hope is a kindness and I had enough left in me to give her that much.
I gave her the afternoon.
The morning of the wedding I was in the linen room folding napkins when my mother found me.
We looked at each other across the small room and what passed between us in that look was everything that didn't need to be said out loud. She said the makeup artists were waiting.
I said then she'd better be found.
My mother looked at me for one more moment and then she left and I went back to my napkins and I breathed and I waited and I let the morning build around me the way I had learned to let things build — patiently, without forcing anything, with the understanding that timing was everything and mine was not yet.
I walked into the great hall when the moment was right.
I had been watching the room. I had positioned myself near enough to the edge to enter cleanly and far enough from the center to appear reluctant. I had arranged my face into the expression it needed to wear — the reluctant conflicted anguish of a sister doing something terrible for reasons she believed were right.
I crossed the floor toward Varder and I felt the eyes of the room follow me and I felt the specific focused weight of his attention land on me when he turned and I stood before him and I bowed and I looked up at his face and I felt six years of wanting hit me like a wall.
He was exactly what I had spent years dreaming about.. Broader than I remembered, his expensive Cologne filling my nose. Scarred in ways that made him extremely sexy that I could feel myself getting wet for him.
I let the cat out of the bag and watched my mom's plan go aflame, it filled me with so much satisfaction to see Ava get slapped,because who did she think she was to steal Varder away from me? And the bitch wanted to blow our cover too, slapping her had been the most fulfilling thing I had ever done. Who can blame me, all is fair in love and war.