The Song Below

The showroom looked like a cathedral of couture. Floor-to-ceiling glass, velvet lounges, classical music threading through hidden speakers like a secret being kept. Gowns hung like reverent ghosts along chrome rails, each one more elaborate than the last. Not a place where things were bought. A place where things were assigned, where a certain kind of woman learned what version of herself was acceptable this season.

Isla moved quietly through the aisles, her fingers trailing over silk and tulle until they stopped. A blush-pink gown. Soft and layered and entirely, unmistakably her. Flowing, romantic, a sweetheart neckline with an embroidered waist of tiny flowers so detailed they seemed to have grown there rather than been stitched. A cascade of seed beads at the hem that caught the light like rain on a warm window. She lifted it from the rack. Held it against herself. Smiled.

“This one,” she said softly, turning it slightly. “It’s beautiful.”

“Mm.” Behind her, Caleb hadn’t looked up from his phone. “It’s fine.”

She turned. He stood four feet away, scrolling with the particular quality of a man whose attention was perpetually elsewhere, his reading glasses low on his nose. When he finally glanced at the dress, the assessment lasted approximately one second.

“It’s sweet,” he said. “Not spectacular.”

“I thought something softer,” she tried. “For a private party--”

“Darling.” He pocketed the phone. The smile appeared, warm, patient, the smile of a man who had perfected the delivery of a correction so that it arrived feeling like care. “You’re not seventeen. This is a high-profile engagement celebration. Media will be there. You need something unforgettable.”

He walked further along the rack. His hands moved with the practiced certainty of someone who was not browsing but selecting, not for her, but for the image she would form in his world. He pulled a navy gown from the rail and held it up. Thousands of micro-crystals caught the light from every angle. Midnight fabric that shimmered like a sky stitched into clothing. The bodice was structured like a corset, sculpted boning, off-shoulder sleeves that draped like liquid darkness. A thigh-high slit. Art. Architecture. A garment that said: look at what I possess.

“Try it on,” he said.

Inside the fitting room, Isla stood in the navy gown and stared at herself for a very long time. She looked extraordinary. The crystals shimmered with every breath. The bodice held her like a frame. She glowed. She did not recognize a single thing about the woman in the mirror.

She’d gotten good at this. Adjusting. Caleb had a name for it, refining, as if she were a rough draft being corrected toward something better, something closer to the thing he’d always meant to acquire. He said it with such even conviction that she’d stopped arguing the premise. Three years was long enough to forget what the original had looked like. She touched the boning at her ribs. The gown held her perfectly, every curve accounted for, nothing left to chance. It was not uncomfortable. It was the opposite of uncomfortable. It was arranged. She looked at the blush-pink dress on its hook, soft, unheld, draped without architecture, and understood the arithmetic of it. That dress had a shape only because she would give it one. This one had a shape regardless of who was inside.

The gown was stunning and the woman wearing it was a stranger, polished and curated and built for display, every soft edge hardened into something that would photograph beautifully and feel like nothing.

She looked at the blush-pink dress still on its hook and felt, with quiet devastation, the specific grief of seeing the last version of yourself being put away.

She stepped out. Caleb’s smile was instant. Pleased. Possessive. The smile of a collector confirming an acquisition.

“There she is,” he said. “My future wife.”

The saleswoman pressed a hand to her chest. “It’s as if it were made for you.”

Isla’s lips arranged themselves into the appropriate expression. “It is beautiful.”

He circled her once, a slow half-rotation she had learned to stand still for. Assessment. Approval. His eyes moved over her the way a property developer surveyed a renovation: checking lines, confirming investment.

“No,” he said. “You are. The dress just knows it.”

He kissed her cheek. Already handing his card to the attendant. “Wrap it,” he told her. “No need to try anything else.” She opened her mouth. She closed it. The pink dress was folded into tissue and disappeared into a box, and she watched it go with the sensation of watching the last familiar light go out in a window. She told herself it didn’t matter. She told herself she’d chosen. She had been telling herself things for three years. She was very good at it.

Later, in the Monaco suite, Caleb poured champagne and smiled.

“To us,” he said.

“To us,” she echoed.

He studied her ring with the unhurried attention of a man reconsidering a decision he had already made. “The setting,” he said. “It’s bulky. Drowning your hand. I want to have it reworked. Charles in Paris, slim the band, change the prong layout entirely.”

“I like it the way it is.”

“Of course you do.” A laugh, gentle, the gentle of a man whose gentleness was a precision instrument. “But this is about you, Isla. I want it fluid. Sculptural. Not a rock in a claw.”

“Do we really have time--”

He kissed her. Deep. Possessive. Timed perfectly to the space where her objection would have been, filling it with warmth and pressure until the objection seemed small, seemed ungracious, seemed like evidence of the very naivete he kept trying to soften in her. She felt her protest dissolve and hated herself for how easily it went.

“Nothing to worry about,” he murmured against her mouth.

He slid the ring from her finger. Kissed the bare spot with theatrical tenderness. Crossed the room and zipped it into a black leather pouch inside his bag.

“You trust me?” he asked, with his back to her.

Not a question. A test. One answer permitted. She pressed her tongue to the roof of her mouth.

“Of course,” she said.

He smiled at the window. At the dark ocean beyond the glass. So easy.

She lay in the bath afterward, rubbing the bare finger, listening to his voice in the other room. Clipped. Businesslike. Laced with irritation. The dress hung from the closet door, its crystals catching the low light.

She’d been wearing the ring for eight months. She knew this because she’d stopped noticing it by month two, which meant the absence now was louder than the presence had ever been. She pressed the bare finger flat against the side of the tub and held it there. He’d said Monday. She told herself Monday. She was good at telling herself things. That his corrections came from love. That she’d chosen this freely. That the voice she was hearing through the door, clipped and businesslike and laced with something she didn’t want to name, was just stress, just the weight of a busy man at the end of a long day. She was excellent at stopping a thought before it finished. It was the only skill she’d developed entirely without his input. She looked at the gown across the room and counted what she’d handed over today: the dress, the ring, the sentence she hadn’t finished in the showroom. Small things. She told herself they were small. She told herself it would be back Monday. She told herself he was thoughtful, not controlling. She told herself she was imagining the distance. Because she didn’t want to know what it meant if she was wrong.