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“Now look at you.”

I look at me. In the big mirror across the room. In my bonnet and my hoodie, sitting on a bed in a house on a cliff, with a ring I can’t get off and a baby I didn’t plan and a Bratva boss downstairs getting bossed by my mama.

“I know,” I say again.

* * *

Auntie Gwen comes in at noon in a white dress.

Not off-white. Not eggshell. White. Lace. To the knee.

Mama’s in the doorway behind her in her robe with her rollers out and her face half done. She looks at the dress. She looks at Auntie Gwen. She doesn’t say one word.

She just says, “Mm.”

Auntie Gwen turns right around and goes back to her room.

She comes back ten minutes later in cream. With a purple scarf.

“Better,” Mama says.

* * *

The dress is white silk.

It was hanging in the closet in his room when I got here, in a garment bag with no name on it. I didn’t open it for two days. I didn’t even look. I told myself I was gonna make him take me shopping, or I was gonna wear my mama’s dress, or I was gonna wear my old jeans and get married in them just to spite him.

Now I’m standing in front of the big mirror in the guest room, and Tasha’s doing up the last of the hooks in the back, and Mama’s sitting on the edge of the bed with her glasses off, just looking.

It’s heavy silk. Real heavy. It pours down my body like water and pools around my feet on the floor. No sleeves. No straps. Just a straight line across my chest with my titties sitting up over it like they’re on display, and my shoulders out, bare and brown.

It’s tight at the waist. It hugs my belly. My soft belly, the part I’ve been sucking in since I was twelve. I’m not sucking it in. I can’t. It’s right there under the silk, round and soft, and somewhere in there is a baby the size of a blueberry, and that man picked a dress that doesn’t hide it.

It drapes over my hips. Over my ass. Over my thighs.

I look grown. I look like somebody’s wife.

I look like his wife.

“No sleeves,” Mama says behind me.

“I know, Mama.”

“I told him sleeves.”

“I know.”

“Mm.” She stands up. She goes to her suitcase. She takes out her purple shawl, the good one, the one she wears on Easter, and comes over and puts it around my shoulders. She fixes it. Tucks it. Stands back.

“Sleeves,” she says.

My eyes get hot. I blink real fast.

“Don’t you cry,” Mama says. “Tasha just did your face.”

“I’m not crying.”

“Good.”