Chapter 1
SLOANE
“You’re a vision, Sloane!” Kerry-Anne exclaims, beaming from her perch on the hotel suite’s velvet couch. She’s surrounded by hair products, shoeboxes, half-sipped flutes of Laurent-Perrier and the air of nervous anticipation I always thought I’d be basking in on my wedding day.
Normally, I’d wave away my best friend’s superlative compliments. Kerry-Anne is the best kind of best friend: when praise is due, she slathers it on thick but genuine, and when it’s not, it’s either radio silence or a pointed and infuriatingly correct remark. But when I gaze into the floor-length mirror of my room in the Grand Saltspring Inn, which will be tidied up by staff during the wedding festivities so Jack and I can return to the bridal suite of our dreams, I barely recognize myself.
My hair, which is normally loose and wavy and kind of wild around my shoulders, is pulled back into a perfect chignon. My skin, usually tanned and clear, has been transformed by the makeup artist into…what, exactly? I look beautiful, objectively, I suppose. Every bit the blushing bride who could have stepped out of the pages ofToday’s Bride, the one Dr. Jack Fordham deserves. Elegant. Timeless. Guileless.
Before I can respond, the door creaks open and my aunt Lisa steps into the room. Her silver-streaked bob frames her face,and her olive-green satin gown matches her bright eyes, which immediately fill with happy tears. This feels like at least the tenth time today she’s cried, as though she’s seeing me as a bride every time for the first time.
“Lisa,” I say, laughing despite the heavy pit sinking in my stomach. “You’re going to ruin your mascara.”
My aunt fans her face. “No one’s going to be looking at me anyway.” She grins. “Look at you. A vision. Truly.”
What doesavisioneven mean? Like a specter? An apparition? There’s something ghostly about it, like I might disappear at any moment. I push that tempting thought away as quickly as it pops into my head.
I glance back at my reflection and find the same stranger I’ve been staring at for the last hour.
“Are you ready, sweetheart?” Lisa asks. She joins me at the mirror, and reaches out to adjust the strap of my dress even though it, like everything else about this occasion, requires no fixing. The dress, like everything else, is perfect.Perfect on paper.
A stunning Sunday afternoon. The most elegant oceanside inn on the coast of Oregon. Bottles of champagne chilling on ice, three flower girls with French braids and baskets of rose petals, a doting doctor groom who will await me under a wedding arch dripping with cascading white orchids.
The wedding dreams are made of.
I nod, willing the slight motion to shake my mind into place, settle the storm that’s been brewing inside me for weeks. There’s a real one coming, according to the morning news, but in keeping with the idyllic rollout of all events and details that have been planned out for the day, it’s politely decided to wait until after the wedding is all wrapped up.
Lisa sighs lightly. “Your mom would have been so proud.”
A pang hits me. What I wouldn’t give for my mother to be here. We were a small family, mostly just me and her for so many years until she got sick. I like to think she’d know exactly what to say to put me at ease today.
“Oh,” she says, extending a small bag dangling from her red-lacquered fingertips. “Jack asked me to give this to you.”
I take the bag. “What’s this?”
“He just said he hoped you’d wear it.”
I suppress a sigh. Of course Jack couldn’t resist a wedding-day surprise. I hate surprises, of all forms, and it disappoints my fiancé to no end, he who considers himself something of a professional romantic gesture–maker.
What could he possibly be sending me? A love letter? Plane tickets for a surprise honeymoon I absolutely do not want the day after this circus of an event?
A ticket out of here?I swallow, then shove that thought deep, deep down. That question has no place on the happiest day of my life.
I push aside the tissue paper and find a small white jewelry box. I take it out of the bag and open the lid, and my stomach sinks even further.
“What is it?” Kerry-Anne asks.
A light sweat forms on my forehead as I lift a pendant I know too well from the box. Every time we’ve visited Jack’s parents in Annapolis, we’ve been greeted in the front hallway of their home by an imposing portrait of his grandmother, Cordelia Marie Fordham, with her mouth perpetually puckered, a rosary clutched in her skeletal fingers, and that massive sapphire, gumball-sized and ringed in diamonds, resting on her bony chest.
Now, I know exactly what I’m meant to do with it. Jack, who was likely under pressure from his mother, has no question sent this as my “something blue.” Except, like everythingorchestrated by my soon-to-be mother-in-law, it’s a passive-aggressive control move wrapped in faux warmth.
“Would you look at that rock!” Lisa says, leaning in. “And I thought yourringwas impressive!” She extracts it from the box, and steps behind me to fasten it around my neck. It’s a loose chain, but all of a sudden, I’m having trouble breathing.
When I replace the top of the box, my three-carat emerald-cut engagement ring catches the light. Without a word, I drop both the box and the bag on the carpet.
“I need to use the washroom,” I breathe. But instead of locking myself in the powder room and throwing up, I stride across the hardwood in my Dior heels and give in to the temptation I’ve been trying desperately to ignore.
I flee.
