I was not maid of honour, not even a bridesmaid, but I was dutifully invited, and for this I needed something suitable to wear, something that would signal my grasp of the occasion as well as my transcendence of it; but no matter where I looked – and I spent hours looking – the dress did not exist. No shop possessed it. There is no point explaining now exactly what I had in mind. The details in themselves do not matter, except to say this dress should accommodate my chest without looking matronly or profane; that it should upstage the bridal gown without appearing to do so; and that I was not exactly conscious of these obstinate stipulations, but clicked through the rails of department stores in an agitated dream, like someone brainwashed to accomplish a murder without their consent.

My solution, in the end, was to make the dress myself. At university, I had done quite a lot of sewing. Gemma, one of my housemates, owned a little sewing machine she taught me how to use, though she hardly used it herself. I would run up silly costumes for my friends for Halloween, and basic items for me. ‘Run up’ was a phrase of my mother’s, one I tried not to use, not out loud at least, though it was stuck firmly to the walls of my mind, like the Blu Tack I had used in my rented room, the greasy little coins from which cost me my deposit. But since I had come back to my parents’ house the previous summer, the sewing kit had stayed packed away, along with all the items it helped me manufacture. I didn’t want to talk about it; I didn’t want my mother to know.

Little by little, then, I decided I would make the dress in secret, and pretend it was vintage: my mother’s side of the family did not approve of second-hand shopping, and Candice was her niece, her younger sister Amanda’s child. My hopeless lunch-break expeditions down the high street became quiet pilgrimages to haberdashery departments, in which I kept my head down, moving quietly among the middle-aged and elderly ladies rattling their knuckles through trays of beads, drawing no more attention than I could help, and asking no questions in case I brought an avalanche of answers down on my head.

Many fabrics presented themselves, and I chose as carefully as I could, avoiding jersey, silk and satin because they would be too difficult to work with, and linen because it would crease. Some bolts of beautiful patterned cotton I put back because I would not be able to make their bold edges join in any logical progression at the seams, or so I told myself, though I think I also quailed at the prospect of them drawing Candice’s wedding guests’ eyes towards me in the way they had drawn my own.