Part Two
At the Aldermoor Hotel, I found Miles already in his tuxedo, looking so much like his father in that particular light that it nearly undid me before I'd said a single word.
I told him exactly what had happened. The note. The dress. The missing jewelry. Odette's account of Camille leaving my hallway in the middle of the night.
His reaction shattered something in me I hadn't expected to still be breakable.
He got angry. At me.
Camille appeared a moment later in white satin, sweetly asking what on earth I'd done to my hair, as though the question itself were an act of concern. When I told her she already knew exactly what had happened to it, Miles accused me — in front of two bridesmaids and his own best man — of trying to sabotage his wedding.
Of trying to sabotage his wedding.
That accusation hurt more than losing my hair ever could have.
The ceremony passed in a blur I still can't fully reconstruct, if I'm honest. I sat in the front row in Faye's navy dress and a silver wig that didn't quite match how my hair used to catch the light, and I watched my son marry a woman I now understood, with total certainty, had drugged nothing but simply waited until I was deeply asleep to do what she'd done.
During cocktail hour, I overheard Camille telling a cluster of guests, in the particular soft voice reserved for concern that isn't real, that I'd been struggling emotionally since Edwin's death and had never quite managed to accept another woman in Miles's life. She mentioned, almost as an aside, that the family might need to "look into some kind of professional support" for me after the honeymoon.
She was no longer satisfied with humiliating me privately.
She was rewriting who I was in public, one sympathetic sentence at a time, before she'd even finished taking my son away from the rest of his family.
Before she'd even finished taking my son away from the rest of his family.
That was when my restraint finally ran out.
I stepped into a quiet side hallway near the kitchen, called Gerald, and told him, in a voice I barely recognized as my own, to stop the transfer entirely, effective immediately, pending a conversation only the two of us would be having later that week.
"Are you certain?" he asked.
"I have never been more certain of anything since Edwin's funeral," I told him.
I have never been more certain of anything since Edwin's funeral.
