“Claire, finally,” she snapped. “Stand next to me, not there. God, why do I have to explain everything?”
I moved into place. My mother fussed with Vanessa’s veil. Kelsey dabbed at the bride’s lipstick with a tissue. Ethan, standing on Vanessa’s other side, caught my eye and gave the smallest apologetic shrug, as if to say I know.
The photographer raised her camera.
And then from inside the pavilion, we heard Vanessa’s scream.
Not a startled sound. Not confusion. Pure fury.
“What the hell is she doing?”
I turned before the last word finished echoing.
Through the open terrace doors, I saw Sophie in the cream chair, frozen with fear, and Vanessa already charging toward her, gathering the front of her gown in one hand like a woman storming into battle.
Time changed texture in that moment. It slowed and sharpened. Every detail became unbearable.
The click of Vanessa’s heels on stone.
The sudden silence from the nearest guests.
The dark glass bottle of Cabernet resting on a server’s tray near the platform.
My daughter’s face, turning from confusion to alarm.
I moved.
But Vanessa moved faster.
“How dare you sit here?” she shouted, voice cracking through the pavilion. “Now you will pay for it!”
She snatched the wine bottle off the tray with such force that the server stumbled backward. Before anyone could process what was happening, Vanessa swung the bottle downward.
The blow caught Sophie high on the side of the head—not hard enough to break the bottle, but hard enough to snap her sideways and send a cry tearing out of her so raw that my entire body turned cold.
I screamed her name.
Sophie slid from the chair to the floor, hands flying to her head, little sparkly shoes scraping against the wood. Guests gasped. Someone dropped a glass.
I was almost there.
Almost.
Vanessa, breathing hard, stood over my daughter like a stranger in a nightmare, her face twisted with the ugliest rage I had ever seen—not embarrassment, not stress, not even temper. Rage. The kind that stripped pretense off a person and left the animal beneath it.
“She ruined my chair!” Vanessa shouted.
