The door of the Bride’s Room was open at half past eight, and Catriona Guthrie was standing in the middle of it in her dress with her back undone, saying a word I had not expected from a solicitor.
“Wellingtons,” she said, when she saw me in the corridor. “Can you do buttons?”
Her sister was sitting on the end of the bed with her hands in her lap, crying in the steady, practical way of someone who had been told she was not allowed to cry until the photographs. There were thirty covered buttons down the back of the dress, and a hook at the top, and the sister’s fingers had given up at nine.
I stood in the doorway.
It was a good room. Isla was right about the light: it came in off the sea through one window and off the garden through the other and met…
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