Page 65 of A Midnight Kiss on Ever After Street
‘I am not going to that ball!’
Scarlett’s in the window, taking the Cinderella dress off the mannequin. ‘Sadie, you’re going. If I have to use a crowbar to get you into this dress, you’re going. If I have to march up to the castle with the dress in one hand while I drag you by the ear with the other, you’re going. If I have to hit you over the head with a shovel, push you up there in a wheelbarrow, and deliver you to the second-chance ball in an unconscious heap with the dress thrown on top of you, you’re going. Don’t think I won’t!’
‘Planned violence – always fun.’
She gives me a scathing look. ‘You’ve spent the past few days expecting the second-chance ball to be cancelled – hehasn’tcancelled it. And because he hasn’t cancelled the ball, he’ll be expecting guests to turn up, and he’ll expect one of those guests to be you. And, by hook or by crook, he will be right. Don’t make me get out my hookormy crook.’
‘Your violent tendencies have been well hidden up until now.’
‘This is my fault too. I had to jump in with #FindCinderella and contact forms and tear-off-strip posters rather than just leaving it to you, and I’m not being responsible for Prince Charming and Cinderella’s story having an unhappy ending. Therefore, you’regoing.’
‘I’m not going, Scar.’
‘Yes, you are.’ She detaches the mannequin’s arm and waves it at me threateningly. ‘The one thing you are going to do for that man is show up.’
‘He hates me. He thinks I used him. Ididuse him.’ I get annoyed at myself for sounding so sulky, but this is pointless. Witt hates parties. He definitely won’t be in the mood for a ball. I didn’t expect him to let it go ahead, but he has – probably for the sake of Ever After Street and the other shopkeepers who didn’t get to go last time – but there’s no way he’s actually going to be there himself, or that he’s going to talk to me, even if he is.
‘And not turning up will do nothing but prove that.’ She huffs. ‘He said he’ll be waiting in the place where you kissed. You are the only person who knows where that is. You’re not going to leave him in the lurch again.’
‘He wrote that weeks ago – before all this came out. He’s not still going to wait there.’
She shrugs. ‘Okay, but you will. Because whether he is or isn’t, you ran away from him last time and you’re not going to do the same this time.’
I mutter something about bossy cousins, and she brings the dress over to the counter and pushes it at me. ‘He suggested this ball to giveyourdresses a second chance. When he wrote that invitation to the missing Cinderella, he already knew who he was inviting. The whole idea of this was to giveyoua second chance – and now you are going to give him one.’
Which is how we end up at the ball that Sunday evening, five weeks to the day of the first one. The sun has been out all day, warming the night air, and a gentle breeze has sprung from the trees – the kind that blows tendrils of hair around delicately, as opposed to the kind that plasters your hair across your face and makes it look like an attractive home for mice.
A team of catering staff arrived this morning and we watched as they made their way up to the castle, but there hasn’t been any of the hullabaloo of the first ball. I expect there to be security men on the door who ask for my ID and immediately throw me out, but there’s no one, no tickets at all this time, a free-for-all. Scarlett and I simply slip in with the other guests.
There’s music, a singer from one ballroom and a classical band from the other, their music clashing as it filters out into the grand entrance hallway. The stairs are blocked off again with a better barrier this time… Witt knows all too well how easy the last one was to climb over.
There are people wearing my dresses, giving them their second chances, and it warms my cold, dispirited heart, and simultaneously makes me want to cry again because of Witt’s thoughtfulness. He did this to give my dresses a second chance to find happiness, and more than anything, I wish he was here to see so many of the dresses I’ve made, dresses he’s helped me steam clean, adjust, and sell, and how much goodhisidea has done for The Cinderella Shopandfor the people who look so happy here tonight.
It’s magical to see people walking around in them, enjoying themselves, dancing while looking lovingly into a partner’s eyes, some new matches doing the awkward first dance of accidentally stepping on each other’s toes, dances that might lead to so much more, just like my dance at a ball like this did a few short weeks ago.
There are murmurs as we thread our way through the guests. The skirt is so flouncy that people have to move aside for me to pass, and they recognise the dress after it being front and centre of our window display for five weeks, and without masks tonight, people recognise me in it. Do they think I’ve put it on because we never found the missing Cinderella? Or do they realise it was me all along?
We pass the portrait wall, still showing the unfaded rectangles of the missing frames. A clue right from the moment I walked through the door five weeks ago. Paintings of a family that have hung there for decades. Paintings that were removed recently, not years ago like I’d imagined, but by Witt, to make sure there wasn’t a scrap of evidence that he’d ever existed. Isawhow unfaded those missing rectangular shapes in the wallpaper were, and I still didn’tseewhy.
Scarlett gives the suits of armour a wide berth as we go past the stairs and slip by the staff kitchen door without being seen. I lead us along a corridor, and have to open a few doors before I find the theatre I remember cutting through with Witt the first time. Another hallway, and then the palatial living room with a ticking grandfather clock and an oil painting depicting a river scene, and I stop at the edge of the room. I’m sure it’s the way that leads to the corridor where the secret door was, and I don’t feel like I have a right to take Scarlett any further.
‘He’s not going to be there.’ I turn to her. ‘He’s going to be hiding out in the castle somewhere, away from the party.’
‘And you’ll know where. The tower or the kitchen or the other places he showed you. But try the place you kissed first, because he invitedyou, Sade. That has to mean something.’
Her words give me a little flutter of hope, but I stamp it down. I desperatelywantit to be true. I want him to be waiting for me more than anything, but he won’t be. Things have changed since he wrote that invitation.
I force a cheery smile and wave her goodbye and slip into the corridor we were in before. Hopefully, anyway. There are many corridors in a castle like this. The rooflights seem familiar, and the wall-planters have been tidied up now, but I can’t be sure I’ve got the right one.
The problem is that I have no ideahowWitt opened the wall that night. I was focused on him, not what he was doing. There was no visible latch. The door was roughly in the middle of the hallway, and I trail my fingers along the honey-coloured bricks, feeling for something, anything, that might give it away.
I walk slowly, stopping to push at certain spots, trying to feel a change in the resistance that suggests it’s not like other parts of the wall, but there’s nothing. I scan the bricks, but every single one looks the same. That night, I admired how concealed it was and marvelled at how he’d literally opened the wall, but now, it doesn’t seem like such a good thing.
And then I remember how tall Witt is. He didn’t bend or stretch and I shimmy along the wall on my tiptoes, stretching up, pressing my hand into every brick I can reach, and even some I have to jump for.
We could be here all night.
I squeak in surprise when a brick moves under my fingertips, and there’s a click as a door-sized part of the wall shifts back, and I can get my fingers in and slide it aside on hidden runners, like he did that night.
