Prologue
ANNIE
August 26, 1994
Most people tell you that life-changing moments sneak up on you. They say you only recognize the shift in hindsight, once the dust has settled and the “after” has already become your new normal.
But I don’t think that’s entirely true.
If you’re paying attention, there are these rare, shimmering beats of time where you can actuallyfeelyour life shifting beneath your feet. It’s a sudden awareness—a realization that you are standing exactly on the edge of a cliff. You know, with a terrifying clarity, that once you take the next step, there is no going back. The person you were ten seconds ago is about to become a stranger.
Sometimes, these moments catch you in the middle of the mundane. You’re scraping dried oatmeal from a bowl or folding the laundry or sitting in traffic. Other times, it isn’t a surprise at all. You see the line in the sand from a mile away. You have weeks, sometimes even months, to stare at it before you make the deliberate, agonizing choice to cross it.
Either way, the outcome is the same. Your life is split, cleanly and forever, into two distinct halves that will never quite fit back together again.
Before.
After.
It’s that mid-July afternoon when you look at your childhood best friend and realize, with a crestfallen grief, that you’re no longer interested in the same version of the future. The silence between you becomes a canyon, and you’re both standing on opposite sides, waving at a ghost. It’s the weight of a landline receiver in your hand as you wait for a boy to pick up, knowing that if he does, your entire trajectory changes—and if he doesn’t, you’ll have to find a way to live with the quiet. It’s the first time you see your parents look at each other and you realize they aren’t just “Mom and Dad”—they are two people who might not actually like each other very much. The pedestal they were on crumbles, and you’re left standing on the floor of the real world. It’s the Tuesday morning you’re standing in a too-long line for coffee when you realize the “dream job” you bled and fought for reveals itself to be nothing more than a beautifully appointed cage. It’s the ritual of taking off a ring you thought you’d wear forever and how your finger feels too light, too naked, and the indentation in your skin is a map of a person you aren’t anymore.
I’ve had six of those moments so far. Six seismic shifts that left fault lines so deep I’ll be tracing the scars with my fingertips for the rest of my life.
This is number seven.
I’m in the bridal suite at the Bel-Air Bay Club, and my Vera Wang is currently performing a heist of my oxygen, sucking my ribs into submission. It’s either the boning in the bodice or the fact that my life has become a runaway train and I’m the only one who forgot to check the brakes. My hands are shaking—nota dainty, “I’m a blushing bride” flutter, but a horrific, quivering tremor. I press them against the heavy silk, but that’s a mistake, because now I can feel my heart hammering against the seams; a frantic bird trying to escape an ivory cage.
The room is tiny and perfect in an expensive, pristine way: a velvet settee in the corner that looks like it’s never met a human butt, white roses exploding from crystal vases, windows framing the lawn where three hundred people are fanning themselves with programs and pretending the August heat isn’t trying to kill them. Three hundred people who flew in from somewhere important, who rearranged their lives, who bought gifts wrapped in matte paper and silk ribbons that cost more than my first car. They’re all out there expecting to watch me marry Daniel Golightly in—God—twenty-seven minutes.
Twenty-seven minutes. In the time it takes to watch a sitcom without the commercials, I will be a “Mrs.”
I can hear the string quartet outside playing something classical. Canon in D, I think. Daniel’s mother, Margaret, picked it. I would have chosen something else that had a little more joy in it but I can’t remember now what that something else was, and that probably tells you everything you need to know about the last two years of my life. My opinions were sandcastles, and the tides of Golightly-Colllier expectations were relentless. Somewhere between the engagement party and the second tasting of the sea bass, I stopped having opinions about my own wedding. Or maybe I still had them, but I just learned to swallow them down because it was easier than fighting about seating charts or whether the invitations should be ecru or cream.
This dress cost forty-two thousand dollars. I know because I overheard my mother on the phone with someone fromTown & Country, her voice practically purring with triumph.Forty-two thousand dollars.I could’ve bought a car. I could’ve funded someone’s college education. I could’ve put a down paymenton a bungalow in Silver Lake, with a yard big enough for a dog or two. Instead, it’s hugging my body like the world’s most luxurious straitjacket, cut on the bias so it clings to every curve (or illusion of one, at least), the back plunging so low my mother’s friends will gasp in that practiced, wealthy way they do. It took three fittings to get it right. Vera Wang was at the last one herself, circling me like I was a sculpture, her clever hands tugging a strap here, smoothing a seam there, then stepping back with one crisp nod. I stood on the pedestal, a mannequin made of flesh and bone, waiting for the transformative joy, the cosmic certainty.
But I only felt profound fatigue.
My hair is a masterpiece of architecture, erected over two hours by a team of stylists wielding enough Aqua Net to threaten the atmosphere, creating an updo that is supposedly “effortless.” Which is hilarious, because nothing about this day has been effortless. My neck is stiff from holding my head like a marble statue and my scalp feels like it’s been colonized by a thousand tiny, metal soldiers.
My makeup is “luminous.” The artist used that word four times, and she wasn’t lying. My hazel eyes are wide and dewy, shaded with expensive taupe and peach. My cheekbones are sculpted from shadow and light. I look like a bride from the pages of a magazine. A beautiful, composed, twenty-five-year-old bride who has her entire life perfectly mapped out.
I want to vomit on these Italian tiles.
Instead, I turn my gaze to the window. Below, the vast emerald lawn is a living, breathing organism of privilege. A sea of women in impossibly crisp pastel linen and hats wide enough to shield entire family secrets, their laughter like the delicate clink of fine crystal. The men, swaddled in dark suits, are a study in subtle suffering—dabbing discreetly at templeswith monogrammed handkerchiefs, surreptitiously loosening ties that probably feel like nooses in this August heat.
I can pick out the key players from this dizzying height. There’s Daniel’s college roommate, Brad or Chad, holding court by the bar, his booming, frat-house laugh carrying on the still air. There’s the dense, solemn cluster of Golightlys—Daniel’s parents, a fortress of steely smiles and assessing eyes; his brothers with their identical, razor-sharp parts in their hair; aunts draped in silent, expensive judgment; a flock of young cousins chasing each other, their shrieks the only genuinely unchecked sound in the whole production.
And then, the other side of the aisle: my father’s world. His entire production company has turned out, a who’s-who of powerful agents, A-list actors pretending humility, directors with their signature scarves, all performing a delicate ballet of networking disguised as celebration. Half of Hollywood, easily. They aren’t just guests; they are shareholders in the spectacle. They’ve come to witness the merger, to be seen, to file away the details for tomorrow’s power lunches.
They’re all waiting. Not for a ceremony, but for the event. For the photos that will be strategically placed inPeopleandVanity Fair.For the framed, eight-by-ten glossies that will hang in the marble foyers of our parents’ mansions—tangible proof of a deal well struck. And eventually, for the portrait that will dominate the entryway of whatever cold, perfect museum Daniel and I will pretend is a home.
The sun is dipping lower, flooding the coast in that syrupy, cinematic gold. “Golden Hour,” my mother had said during the planning meetings.I sat through those meetings like a ghost haunting my own life, watching a play about a wedding I wasn’t sure I invited myself to.
The photos. They will outlive this feeling. They’ll hang in hallways I walk through like a stranger, in houses that havenever heard my real laugh. I’ll be fifty, pouring a glass of wine in some silent kitchen, and I’ll glance at one and wonder:Where did she go? The girl with the hopeful eyes? What did you do with her?
They’ll immortalize not a fresh beginning, but this exact, paralyzing moment of cognition—the copper-taste certainty that I am being expertly, beautifully marched toward a precipice, and everyone will call the freefall “happily ever after.”
Beyond the meticulously manicured hedges and the heavy iron gates—ones designed to keep the riffraff out and the secrets in—I know the vultures are circling.
