the next day when Tanner had threatened to drag her to get married right then, she should’ve taken him up on it.
Maybe then she wouldn’t be going through the most vicious of wedding planning torture: the gown fittings. The gown everything. She’d almost rather be on the run for her life than be twisted, pulled on, poked and prodded and, worst of all, oohed over.
“My brother is going to lose his…stuff when he sees you in this wedding gown.”
Cassandra Dempsey Martin was the only person Bree knew who could out curse a seasoned sailor yet still be in tears at the sight of the wedding gown.
Cheryl grabbed Cassandra’s hand that was fluttering emotionally in midair and nodded. “Oh, honey, it really does look more gorgeous every time you put it on.”
Bree grimaced. “It’s just so much money to spend on a dress that I’m only going to wear once. That’s just so impractical. Why would I do this?”
It went against every instinct Bree had to be impractical. She was nothing if not logical, orderly and pragmatic.
Cassandra rolled her eyes. “It’s your wedding dress. It’s supposed to be impractical. Because if you do it right, you only do it once. Because you deserve to wear a beautiful gown walking down the aisle. And besides, it’s really not that much for a wedding dress. Most gowns cost five times that much.”
Bree just stared at herself in the three-way mirror. She had to admit, it was a beautiful, elaborate dress. It made her waist seem trimmer, and her hips, which had filled out to a much more feminine shape over the last few months since she was eating regularly and not on the run for her life, flared nicely under the material.
But it was too fancy. Too much lace. Too many sequins. Too much of that itchy white stuff. It was a gorgeous gown, but it just wasn’t her. She shouldn’t have let herself be talked into it, but Cheryl and Dan—the people who had taken her in when she first arrived in Risk Peak basically living out of her car—had insisted on buying her a gown. Then Bree had made the mistake of taking Cassandra and a group of their friends shopping with her for one.
She’d put this gown on in the dressing room with the associate’s help and then almost taken it back off again. It was too fancy. But the damned associate had talked her into showing it to her friends.
There was so much crying and cursing from her friends when they saw the dress, Bree figured they must know something she didn’t. And when it came to dresses, that was a lot. So she’d gotten it.
And it was still just as beautiful. She couldn’t deny that.
Plus, if she was honest, she could admit it wasn’t really even the dress that had her in such a tizzy. It was the fact that in two weeks she was going to have to stand up in front of over five hundred people—that was more people than she’d ever talked to in her entire life combined—and say her vows to Tanner. Vows they’d agreed to personalize and write themselves.
If Bree speaking in front of a huge group of people about her emotions wasn’t a recipe for disaster, she didn’t know what was. The elegant bride in the beautiful dress looking back at her from the mirror broke out into a sweat at the thought.
She’d been engaged to Tanner for seven months. In love with him since almost the first moment she’d met him months before that. But she was only just now getting to the point where she could make coherent sentences about her emotions directly to him alone. He didn’t seem to mind when she stuttered over words or blurted out often socially inappropriate declarations. He took it in stride and had learned how to “speak Bree fluently,” as he called it.
But it wouldn’t be just Tanner at the wedding in two weeks. It would be a bunch of people who didn’t speak Bree fluently. She was going to make a complete fool out of herself and embarrass him. She already knew it. And didn’t see any way to get around it.
“Hey, do you really not like it that much? You look gorgeous.” Cassandra made eye contact with Bree in the mirror as she peeked over her shoulder.
“No, it’s not the dress.” Not just the dress, although the dress was pretty much an icon for the fraud Bree felt like. “It’s the whole wedding. I’m just not good at this stuff, you know that.”
Cassandra grinned. “You’re not giving yourself enough credit for how far you’ve come in the last few months. Think about what we’ve done with New Journeys.”
Cheryl smiled her encouragement too. “A far cry from that exhausted woman who fell asleep at the diner table over a year ago.”
The seamstress came in and positioned Bree’s arms to do the pinnings for the final fitting. Cassandra was right in a lot of ways. When Bree moved here a year ago, she’d barely known how to talk to anyone. Now she was helping run a very successful women’s shelter program. It had grown so big that a few months ago they’d had to move into a larger facility.
“New Journeys still doesn’t mean I’m not going to make a complete idiot out of myself in front of the town during the ceremony.” Bree spun in the opposite direction when the seamstress motioned for her to do so. “Good thing we’re not going to split the aisles between the bride’s side and the groom’s side. My side would be so empty we might tip over the whole church.”
Bree’s only family was her cousin Melissa. She and her husband, Chris, and their twin nineteen-month-olds were coming, and Bree was so thrilled to see the babies that had first brought her and Tanner together. But it still didn’t make up for the fact that Tanner had been born and raised in Risk Peak and knew half the residents of Grand County personally.
Cassandra shook her head. “You know people here love you. Mom would probably sit on your side. I definitely would. We both like you better than Tanner anyway.”
Bree laughed as the seamstress finished her pinning and began to carefully take off the lovely gown. Cassandra was right—the people in Risk Peak cared about her. She needed to remember that.
And try to live through her own wedding.
An hour later, Bree and Cassandra were pulling up to the three-story office building on the outskirts of Risk Peak that had been converted into apartments and bedrooms for the shelter. The stress from the wedding planning and dress fitting melted away when Bree saw it. This place gave her purpose. This place made a difference in women’s lives.
Bree knew what it was like to live in fear and feel like she had no options. If she could help take that same heavy sense of despair from another woman, she would gladly do it. She’d been teaching computer skills to the women at New Journeys for the past seven months; Cassandra offered training in basic cosmetology for those interested in that route.
Cassandra and Bree walked in the main front door that opened into the hallway and expansive living room of New Journeys. The living room was giant—they’d deliberately knocked out a number of walls when they remodeled the place to give the room a wide-open feel. A television sat in one corner with a couch and a couple of chairs around it. A second corner had been turned into a giant reading nook, with books of every kind and for every age. The other end of the room held a table with a half-completed jigsaw puzzle and board games stacked on a corner shelf.
This was the family room, even for the people here, many of whom struggled to understand what a family was supposed to feel like. Family was another concept Bree hadn’t understood very
