Chương 1
""I found my mother in Daniel’s bed six hours before I was supposed to marry him, and the first thing she did was smile.
Not a startled smile, not the reflexive grimace of someone caught doing something unforgivable, but the small satisfied curve I had seen whenever Vivian Rowe believed she had won.
Daniel jerked the sheet over his waist and stared at me as though I were the person who had entered the wrong room.
Vivian did not bother covering herself beyond pulling the comforter across her chest.
“He was never really yours,” she said.
The room belonged to the bridal suite at Bellweather House, a restored estate outside Philadelphia where one hundred and eighty-three people were scheduled to watch me marry Daniel Mercer the following morning.
My wedding dress hung two floors below us in a garment bag with my new initials embroidered inside the collar.
For several seconds, that ridiculous detail occupied more space in my mind than either naked person in front of me.
Daniel said my name.
I looked at him.
“Claire.”
He said it again, softer this time, as if volume were the problem.
My mother reached for the champagne flute on the nightstand.
Her lipstick had left a coral crescent on the rim.
“Don’t cause a scene,” she said.
I almost laughed.
There was something breathtaking about being instructed to behave properly by a woman sitting half naked in my fiancé’s bed.
Instead, I closed the door behind me.
Daniel seemed encouraged by that.
He swung his feet onto the floor and began gathering his clothes.
“Listen, this looks—”
“Daniel.”
He stopped.
I had spent four years listening to him finish sentences because he hated being interrupted, so interrupting him then felt strangely intimate.
I looked at the charcoal suit pants crumpled beside my mother’s shoe.
“How long?”
Vivian took a drink.
Daniel rubbed both hands over his face.
“Claire, not now.”
“When?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It matters to me.”
Vivian sighed.
That sigh was familiar enough to reach backward through thirty-four years of my life.
She had used it when I cried at my father’s funeral, when I changed colleges, when I refused to become an interior decorator because she considered event design frivolous in a more socially acceptable way.
“Tomorrow is costing almost two hundred thousand dollars,” she said.
“Most of which I paid.”
Her mouth tightened.
“Exactly why you shouldn’t throw it away.”
Daniel found his shirt and pulled it on without buttoning it.
“This was a mistake.”
Vivian laughed into her glass.
“No, darling.”
She looked at me.
“Getting caught was the mistake.”
Something inside me went very still.
I had always assumed there would be noise if my life broke apart.
A crash, maybe, or my own voice becoming unrecognizable.
Instead, I heard the old radiator clicking behind the curtains and a lawn mower somewhere beyond the windows.
A housekeeping cart squeaked along the hallway.
Someone downstairs dropped something metal and swore.
The world had the indecency to continue.
I glanced toward the dresser.
The lamp was ugly, brass with a carved wooden base, and I had complained about it when we first toured the property.
Three months earlier, after my grandmother’s sapphire earrings disappeared during one of Vivian’s parties, I had placed a small security camera inside that base.
Bellweather House had become the unofficial headquarters for wedding preparations, and Vivian had invited people through it as if she owned the estate.
I had forgotten about the camera.
They had too.
A pinprick of blue light blinked behind the carving.
Once.
Then again.
I lowered my eyes before either of them followed my gaze.
Daniel came closer.
“Can we talk downstairs?”
“About what?”
“Us.”
My mother gave him a look that was almost amused.
He noticed it and flushed.
For the first time, I saw something between them that hurt more than the sex.
Familiarity.
They had private reactions to each other.
Private jokes, perhaps.
Arguments I had never heard.
Habits.
This was not one drunken collision between two selfish people.
I slid my engagement ring from my finger.
Daniel watched it come off.
His shoulders loosened.
He thought I was surrendering.
That realization nearly made me put the ring back on just to frighten him.
Instead, I placed it on the vanity beside my mother’s pearl earring.
“We can deal with this privately,” Daniel said.
“Canceling tomorrow would humiliate everybody.”
“Everybody?”
“You know what I mean.”
“I’m not sure I do.”
He buttoned his shirt incorrectly, skipped a button, noticed, and started over.
“Employees are coming.”
“Your employees.”
“Our friends.”
“Some of them.”
“Investors.”
There it was.
Vivian looked at him sharply.
Daniel stopped buttoning.
I folded my arms because my hands had begun shaking.
Mercer Dynamics was scheduled to announce a major financing agreement on Monday morning.
Several people attending the wedding were connected to that deal.
Daniel had spent months cultivating the image of stability around himself, and apparently I had been part of the presentation.
“You’re worried about Monday,” I said.
“No.”
“You just listed investors before family.”
“I’m trying to explain the scale of this.”
My mother set down her glass.
“Claire, you have always had a tendency to make emotional decisions and then punish everyone else for them.”
I stared at her.
She believed that.
That was the astonishing part.
In Vivian’s version of the room, I was already the dangerous person.
I picked up my phone from the table near the door.
Daniel moved toward me.
“What are you doing?”
“Going downstairs.”
“Are you calling someone?”
“Eventually.”
“Claire.”
I opened the door.
He caught my wrist.
Not hard, but hard enough.
We both looked down at his hand.
He released me immediately.
“Sorry.”
I rubbed the place his fingers had been.
“Don’t touch me again.”
His face changed then.
Not remorse.
Fear.
It lasted perhaps a second, but I saw it.
I walked out.
Vivian called after me.
May you like
“Think before you embarrass yourself.”
I kept walking until I reached the library at the end of the west corridor.
