Chapter Three: The First Dance
The bandleader announced it with the practiced warmth of someone who has introduced first dances at many weddings and understands that the crowd wants to be welcomed into the moment rather than instructed toward it.
Guests shifted in their seats. Phones appeared. The floor cleared, the candlelight seemed to warm another degree, and Sophie and Marcus walked to the center of the hall the way they had practiced — her right hand in his left, his right hand at her waist, the specific comfortable geography of two people who have figured out how to occupy space together.
The music began.
It was the song they had argued least about, which had become Marcus’s criterion for the final choice, which Sophie had found completely sensible. A slow waltz arrangement of something neither of them could claim was objectively perfect but that both of them felt at home with, which was close enough.
She was watching his face. He was watching hers. They were doing what you do in a first dance, which is ignore the room and let the room watch you, which is a kind of privacy in public that Sophie had not expected to feel so natural.
She was aware of the floor — of the way her train was arranged behind her, of the particular care required by her shoes on the parquet, of the way the light was hitting the windows along the east wall and throwing long amber rectangles across the dance floor.
She was not aware, until later, of exactly when Marcus’s expression changed.
It happened fast.
His eyes dropped to a point just behind her left heel, and his face did something she had never seen it do — something that was not fear, exactly, but its precursor, the half-second before the body catches up with what the eyes have registered. His hand at her waist tensed once.
And then he moved.
