Because you’re still jealous, and still trying to find fault, Jordan told herself with a mental kick, and kept doing her level best to squash the feeling out of existence.
“You’re so distracted,” Garrett said a few days before the wedding, when Jordan’s dad had all but ordered her to stop cleaning and go out for a date. “Do you even want to make out?”
“Not really,” Jordan confessed, and Garrett sat up as Jordan finger-combed her hair back into place. Ten minutes of kissing in the backseat of his Chevrolet had pulled it out of its blue band. “Sorry.”
“You’re killing me,” he said with big soulful eyes, but he hopped out of the backseat fishing for his keys. He wasn’t one of those boys to keep pushing if a girl said no; he groaned, but he backed off. Maybe this year we . . . Jordan thought, trailing off.
“What’s on your mind?” Garrett asked as they rearranged themselves in the front seat and he turned the car for home. “Wedding stuff?”
“It’ll be easier when it’s done,” Jordan admitted. Surely it would. Anneliese Weber would be Anneliese McBride, her stepmother. They’d be a family. That would be that.
THE WEDDING MORNING dawned bright and beautiful. Jordan was up first, pressing her dad to swallow some toast. He looked so sweetly nervous as she slipped a white rosebud into his buttonhole, smiling from under those straight dark-blond brows just like her own. “I thought I’d be the one walking you down the aisle.”
“Not for a while yet, Dad.” She stood back. “There.”
“You’ve been a brick, welcoming Anneliese like this. It means a lot.”
“Better catch your cab,” Jordan managed to say despite her choked-up throat. “If Father Harris shows up tipsy, pour some coffee into him. No postponing this wedding; I’m not stuffing you into this suit twice!”
She snapped a few shots off, then saw her father into his cab before dashing up to the guest room.
Ruth answered her knock, putting a smile on Jordan’s face. “Ruthie, you look like a princess! Twirl for me?” Ruth twirled solemnly, blond hair brushed out over the lace collar of her new blue velvet dress. I’m going to get a laugh out of you this weekend if it’s the last thing I do, Jordan vowed.
“There you are.” Anneliese stood before the mirror patting her face and neck with a powder puff, perfectly composed in her pink suit and broad-brimmed cream hat, not a bridal nerve in sight. “We’re almost ready.”
“You’re a vision,” Jordan said. “Dad will be speechless.”
“You look lovely too.” Anneliese turned, looking Jordan over in her blue dress, and for once she seemed to speak impulsively. “I look forward to making you things, Jordan. I make all our day clothes, Ruth’s and mine—I could run up a summer dress for you if you liked. Something not fussy, you aren’t a fussy girl. Three-quarter length, nothing floral printed . . .” Anneliese stopped herself with a laugh, looking suddenly rueful. “Du meine Güte, I swore I wouldn’t start offering to dress you, like you were a child! It’s the opposite, you see—it would be a pleasure to make a dress for someone who isn’t a child and wanting everything ruffled.”
Jordan felt herself startled into genuine laughter. “It sounds like we’d better set up the sunroom for you as a sewing room, then. But first”—she reached into her blue clutch for something she’d meant to offer days ago but hadn’t quite been able to manage—“I thought you might like to wear this today.” She held out the gold bracelet her father had given her on her sixteenth birthday.
“I would be honored,” Anneliese said quietly.
The last knot in Jordan’s stomach melted away. “Now you have something borrowed—”
“Something old—” Anneliese patted the string of gray pearls around her neck.
“Something new—” Jordan fastened the bracelet around her soon-to-be stepmother’s wrist. “Your pink suit—”
“And something blue,” Anneliese finished, lifting her bouquet of creamy roses with stems wrapped in pale blue satin ribbon.
Jordan smiled. “The cab’s waiting.”
Anneliese straightened her hat and glided downstairs. She glided into the chapel with the same silent grace, and Jordan saw tears in her father’s eyes. This makes it all worth it, she thought. Father Harris’s voice rolled across the chapel, and it was done.
THERE WAS CAKE and champagne in the vestry afterward, corks popping as friends crowded around. Soon the newlyweds would take a cab to South Station and be off to their honeymoon; Jordan had already prepared little bags of rice