Chapter 6 Livestock

Georgia's POV

The day descended upon me with the silent certainty of an eclipse.

I felt it before I opened my eyes. That particular quality of morning light pressing through my curtains, too bright, too insistent, the kind of light that does not care what it is illuminating. I lay in the last bed that had ever been mine and stared at the ceiling and listened to the house already moving around me, voices in the hallway, the caterer's van in the drive, my mother's heels on the marble below, precise and relentless as a metronome counting down to something that could not be stopped.

My wedding day.

I felt it metastasizing inside me, an exquisite malignancy spreading cell by poisoned cell. Not a celebration. A transaction. One where my flesh was the only currency that held any value, and it had never truly belonged to me. Not in any way that mattered.

This is what dying feels like. A slow, beautiful suffocation wrapped in silk that everyone applauds.

I was still in bed when the knock came. Not my mother's knock, sharp and functional, two precise raps that meant get up, we have a schedule. This one was softer. Three uneven beats, the same pattern since childhood, the secret language of someone who had always announced himself differently to me than to the rest of the world.

Michael.

I sat up.

He pushed the door open and stood in the frame in his tuxedo, which he was already wearing wrong, the bowtie hanging loose around his collar, the top button undone. He looked like himself wearing a costume, which was the most Michael thing I could imagine, and the sight of him standing there, rumpled and real in the middle of all this orchestrated perfection, hit me somewhere unguarded.

He was three years older than me and we had the same dark hair and the same pale eyes and absolutely nothing else in common with our parents. We had decided this about ourselves at ages seven and ten respectively, sitting in the back of a town car on the way home from some function neither of us had wanted to attend, and it had been the founding document of everything between us ever since.

He looked at me now the way he always looked at me when things were bad. Not with pity. Not with the false brightness everyone else deployed when they needed me to perform okayness. Just directly. Clearly. Like he was taking inventory of the damage and not looking away from any of it.

"Hey," he said.

"Hey."

He came in and sat on the edge of my bed, in the same spot Miranda had sat three weeks ago, and the similarity made something in my chest clench. The people who loved me kept sitting in that spot, kept looking at me with that particular expression, kept arriving too late to do anything useful and staying anyway because they couldn't bear to leave.

For a long moment neither of us said anything. Outside, a door slammed. My mother's voice rose briefly and then was controlled again. The machinery of the day grinding forward, indifferent to whatever was happening in this room.

"You don't have to do this," Michael said quietly.

Not are you okay. Not you look beautiful. Straight to it, the way he always went straight to it, because we had never had the kind of relationship that required preamble.

I looked at my hands in my lap. "Yes I do."

"Georgia."

"Michael." I met his eyes. "I know what you're going to say. I know you mean it. And I need you to not say it today because I cannot hear it today and still walk down that aisle, and if I don't walk down that aisle, Dad loses everything. The company. The house. All of it." My voice stayed even. I had been practicing even for months. "So please. Not today."

His jaw tightened. I watched him swallow whatever he had come here to say, watched him pack it back down the same way I packed everything down, and felt the specific grief of recognizing your own survival mechanisms in someone you love.

"He's too old for you," he said finally, which was not what he had come here to say but was a safer version of it.

"Fifteen years isn't that old."

"It's not the years." His voice was low and careful, each word placed deliberately. "It's the way he looks at you, George. Like you're something he acquired. Like checking the market value of an asset." He stopped. Looked at the window. "I've watched him at every dinner, every event. He has never once looked at you like you're a person he can't wait to know better."

The truth of it landed in my stomach like something cold and heavy.

"I know," I said.

The two words sat between us, quiet and terrible.

Michael turned back to me and his expression had shifted into something raw that he wasn't quite managing to keep off his face. My composed, controlled older brother, who had learned to perform the Steele stoicism as fluently as I had, was sitting on the edge of my childhood bed on my wedding morning and looking at me like someone watching a door close that he knows won't open again from the outside.

"I'm going to be here," he said. "Whatever happens after this. Whatever it looks like. I'm here."

My throat tightened.

I nodded because speaking would have cracked me in two, and I did not have the luxury of cracking today. I had a ceremony in four hours and a performance to give that would be the most demanding of my life, and I needed every piece of myself intact and in its designated place.

Michael reached over and took my hand. Not frantically, the way Miranda had, not with the desperate intensity of someone trying to pull me back from an edge. Just held it, the way he had held it when we were children and the house was loud with our parents' careful, terrible silence, and I had crept down the hall to his room and climbed into the chair by his desk and neither of us had said anything because nothing needed to be said.

We sat like that until my mother's heels stopped outside the door.

"Georgia." Her voice through the wood, clipped and purposeful. "The hair and makeup team has been waiting for twenty minutes."

Michael released my hand. Stood. Straightened his loose bowtie without fixing it and looked down at me with those pale eyes that were the same as mine, the eyes we had gotten from somewhere further back in the family than either of our parents, some ancestor who had perhaps also sat in a room they couldn't leave and looked for the exit anyway.

"I love you," he said. Simply. Without performance.

"I love you too."

He left. I listened to his footsteps move down the hall, unhurried, deliberate, the walk of a man who had somewhere to be that he did not want to go.

Then I stood up. Put my feet on the cold floor. And began the process of assembling the woman who was going to get married today.