The dress was white in the purest sense of the word, not ivory, not cream, not champagne. White. Hand-stitched Italian lace climbing over my shoulders like frost. Pearls sewn so delicately into the bodice they seemed to float rather than shimmer. A cathedral train spread behind me in a pool of silk and tulle. It was the kind of dress that made women put their hands to their throats and men forget how to speak. The kind of dress little girls imagine when they still believe weddings are the beginning of every good thing.
For one terrible second, I wasn’t thirty-two years old and one of the most powerful women on Wall Street.
I was eight again, standing by the window of a foster home in Newark while another family came to pick up the girl who slept in the bed beside mine.
I was eleven, hearing one foster mother say to another, not quite quietly enough, “She’s polite, but there’s something guarded about her. Children know when they aren’t wanted.”
I was sixteen, sitting in a borrowed dress at a scholarship banquet, smiling through dessert while the parents at my table introduced their children and asked, with carefully arranged kindness, who had come with me.
No one, I had said.