Chapter 1 - The Letter at Table Twelve
“DON’T READ THAT LETTER!”
The groom shouted it so loudly that the string quartet stopped in the middle of a song.
Every head in the ballroom turned.
My daughter, Emily, sat perfectly still in her wedding dress, an ivory envelope trembling between her fingers. Across the table, her intended husband, Daniel Whitmore, looked as though someone had punched the air out of him.
I stood beside her in a navy-blue lace gown, holding the speech I had spent six nights writing. My chemotherapy had taken my hair. It had not taken my voice.
“Why not, Daniel?” I asked.
He rushed toward us. “Because this is private.”
“You mean the part about what happened to Emily’s father?”
Emily looked up at me. “Mom?”
The entire room seemed to tilt. Six chandeliers burned above two hundred guests. Champagne sparkled. A seven-tier cake waited near the windows, untouched. And Daniel’s mother, Vivian, began walking toward us with the rigid smile of a woman trying to stop a disaster before anybody recognized it.
“Margaret,” Vivian hissed, “you’re sick. You’re confused. Sit down.”
I almost laughed. I had buried enough lies to know that people rarely called you confused until you were dangerously close to the truth.
Emily unfolded the page. Her lips moved silently, reading the first sentence.
Then her face drained of color.
“No,” she whispered. “That’s impossible.”
Daniel seized the back of a chair.
“Emily, listen to me—”
She jerked away from him. “You knew?”
A server dropped a glass. It shattered like a gunshot.
I had planned to give my daughter a blessing. Instead, minutes before the ceremony was meant to begin, I was about to tell her why the man she had planned to marry had spent fourteen months keeping her away from my hospital room.
May you like
And why the signature at the bottom of that letter belonged to a man we had buried seventeen years ago.
I could hear a woman in the third row whisper that weddings were supposed to be happy occasions. I wanted to turn around and tell her I had wanted happiness more than anyone. I had imagined my daughter laughing beneath those chandeliers while I stole a few moments to memorize her face. Instead, I was measuring the distance between her chair and the nearest exit, because fear has a way of turning every mother into a lookout. When Emily met my eyes, she did not look away. That small act of trust kept me standing.
