Dylan and Julius were waiting at the top of the steps as people gathered for the show. Olivia would be with Maggie, changing into their Audrey Hepburn and Grace Kelly dresses.
Daphne stopped at the open front door. “I don’t know what I’m getting worked up about. No one will remember me or give a hoot about meeting a Hollywood costume designer.” She peered inside at the rows of chairs, filling up with people from the town where she’d lived for such a short time. Her great-great-grandfather stared down at the audience from his portrait above the fireplace. “I used to talk to old George’s ghost.”
“Did he talk back to you?” Dylan asked, taking her other arm. Julius, obviously protective of Daphne, scowled, but Dylan just shrugged. “Fair question.”
Daphne laughed, visibly more at ease. “In his own way, he definitely talked back to me. My father wasn’t like him at all. That much I know.” She left it at that and pointed into the library at Grace Webster and Audrey Frost, sitting next to each other up front. “They encouraged me when I started tutoring a few kids in French. I could speak the language, but I was no teacher.”
Phoebe said, “I thought at first whoever created the room had gone to Paris.”
“I love Paris but Southern California is home.” More tears shone in Daphne’s deep green eyes. “And for a while, so was Knights Bridge. Now go, Phoebe. Do your thing and enjoy every minute.”
As she excused herself and headed backstage, Noah and Dylan, with Julius right behind them, escorted Daphne into the library. Noah caught Phoebe’s eye and she mouthed, “Thank you.” She looked around for Loretta Wrentham but didn’t see her…until she arrived backstage. The California lawyer—Dylan McCaffrey and Noah Kendrick’s friend—had on a tie-dyed shirt, a fringed vest and wide-legged turquoise pants.
“I think I wore this outfit in sixth grade,” she said with a grin. “It’s those twin sisters of yours. They could talk a frog into camping out under a cactus.”
Phoebe burst into laughter, and then Loretta did, too. Daphne Stewart, aka Debbie Sanderson, was living the life she always wanted. Phoebe realized that her father had, too—that his untimely death didn’t change the fact that his life in Knights Bridge with his wife and four daughters was exactly what he’d wanted.
She was living the life she wanted, too.
Except everything had changed when Noah Kendrick swept her onto the dance floor in the Edwardian dress that Daphne Stewart had sewn in her attic room forty years ago.
*
Daphne Stewart/Debbie Sanderson was greeted like the celebrity she was, on the stage her great-great-grandfather had insisted be included in the small-town library he founded. Noah thought Phoebe was even more beautiful in her princess dress without the mask, the heavy makeup, the black wig—the pretending to be someone else. With her dark strawberry curls falling out of their pins, framing her face, she smiled and laughed among people she knew and loved.
He sat with Julius, Dylan and Daphne in the row behind Grace Webster. Grace would glance back at Dylan as if he she’d dreamed of having a grandson just like him.
Maggie and Olivia wowed the crowd with their Grace Kelly and Audrey Hepburn dresses, and Ava and Ruby O’Dunn had everyone laughing when they did a short skit in their flapper dresses. Their mother modeled a simple, elegant dress that Grace Webster’s mother—Dylan’s great-grandmother—had worn long before the people of the Swift River Valley had realized their towns were doomed.
Loretta obviously had a grand time showing off her hippie outfit.
Julius leaned toward Noah and whispered, “That Loretta’s a stitch.”
Dylan overheard him and just shook his head. Noah didn’t try to hide his amusement. Brandon Sloan was across the aisle with his sons. He looked more comfortable in his own skin, if also more interested in the women in the dresses than the dresses themselves. They were his friends, and one was his wife. Even if he packed up his tent and moved to California, Brandon would still be a part of Knights Bridge.
It was a warm evening. Noah found himself alone as the after-show party spilled outside onto the lawn and across South Main onto the town common. Daphne had grabbed a glass of wine and was chatting comfortably with Elly O’Dunn.
He spotted Phoebe under a tall, graceful elm and grabbed two glasses of wine and joined her. She’d slipped off her sandals and was barefoot in the grass. She thanked him as he handed her a glass, but her mind was clearly elsewhere.
She sipped the wine, her gaze on her mother and her former French tutor. “My mother stayed in Knights Bridge and Daphne took off for Hollywood—changed her name, became someone else.”
“Or thought she became someone else,” Noah said.