Sophie brightened. Ethan crouched to her level. “Ready to steal the show?”
She nodded gravely. “I practiced.”
“I don’t doubt it.”
He stood and gave me a warm smile. “Thanks for making the trip, Claire.”
There was something painful in how easy he was to like. Not because I wanted him, not even a little, but because decent people made Vanessa’s kind of cruelty feel more obscene. She always seemed to acquire good things she had never earned.
The ceremony itself, somehow, went perfectly.
The guests took their seats beneath the afternoon sun. A string quartet played something soft and elegant. Sophie walked down the aisle in her blush dress and tiny sparkly shoes, scattering petals with such serious concentration that half the guests were smiling before Vanessa even appeared.
Vanessa glided down the aisle on our father’s arm in a fitted ivory gown with a long train and a cathedral veil catching in the breeze. She looked radiant, and I hated that both things could be true at once—that someone could be beautiful and vicious in the same exact moment.
They exchanged vows beneath the rose-wrapped arch. Ethan’s voice cracked. Vanessa’s did not. When they kissed, the guests applauded, and for a brief second, with sunlight pooling over the vineyard and music lifting over the hills, it almost looked like the beginning of a happy life.
Then the reception began, and reality caught up.
The reception hall was an open-air stone pavilion overlooking the vines, dressed in white florals, candlelight, and polished wood. A jazz trio played near the dance floor. Servers moved between tables with trays of champagne. The sweetheart table sat on a slightly raised platform at the front, with two ornate cream-colored chairs behind it. Vanessa had obsessed over those chairs for weeks. They were antique French reproductions she’d had specially rented because she wanted, in her own words, “something regal, not basic.”
By six-thirty, dinner had not yet been served because Vanessa had insisted on redoing the seating chart after deciding at the last minute that one of Ethan’s college friends had been seated too close to “better families.” The planner was visibly sweating. The band was improvising to fill time. Guests had started drinking more heavily than was wise in the California heat.
Sophie had been a dream all day, but she was six years old, running on excitement, sugar, and very little patience. By the time the first dance ended, I could see the crash coming.
She tugged on my hand. “Mommy, my feet hurt.”
“Do you want to sit with me for a while?”
She nodded.
