Chapter 1 - The Broken Vows
The sound of my mother’s cane striking the marble floor was sharper than the wedding bells outside.
It skidded across the corridor, bounced once against the cream-colored wall, and disappeared beneath a table covered in white roses.
One second, my mother was standing beside the dressing-room doors.
The next, she was falling.
I saw Claire’s jeweled heel extended behind her.
I dropped the folder in my hand and lunged forward.
My arm caught my mother around the waist before her head hit the floor, but her bad leg folded beneath her.
She cried out as I lowered her carefully onto the marble.
“Mom.”
“I’m all right,” she said immediately.
She was not.
Her face had turned pale.
One hand clutched my sleeve while the other pressed against her left hip.
That hip had never healed properly after the car accident that killed my father four years earlier.
Three surgeries had allowed her to walk again, but only with a cane and only if she moved slowly.
Claire knew every detail.
She had visited Mom in rehabilitation.
She had stood beside the hospital bed and promised to help our family through the loss.
Now she straightened the front of her wedding dress and checked her veil in the mirror.
“Are you insane?” I shouted.
She looked at me as though I had raised my voice over a misplaced flower arrangement.
“She fell.”
“You kicked her cane.”
“I moved my foot.”
“You kicked it out from under her.”
Claire’s mouth tightened.
“Don’t start this today, Ethan.”
I stared at her.
“Don’t start this?”
“My wedding begins in fourteen minutes.”
Our wedding.
She said my wedding only when speaking to guests and vendors.
In private, she had called it her wedding for nearly a year.
My mother pulled gently at my jacket.
“Ethan, please help me sit up.”
I slipped one arm behind her shoulders.
“Don’t move yet.”
“I didn’t hit my head.”
“Your hip?”
“It just aches.”
I looked at the folder I had dropped on the floor.
It contained the final estate transfer documents Claire’s father had insisted I sign this morning.
I was supposed to hand over the voting rights of my father’s company to Claire’s family trust.
It was presented as a formality to merge our families.
Looking at Claire’s cold, unblinking eyes, I finally saw the truth.
She didn't love me.
She was eliminating an obstacle.
I stood up, leaving the folder on the floor, and pulled my phone from my tuxedo pocket.
“What are you doing?” Claire demanded, her voice losing its sweet edge.
“I am calling an ambulance for my mother, and then I am walking out that front door.”
Claire stepped entirely out of the dressing room, her pristine white gown dragging over the legal folder.
“If you cancel this wedding, Ethan, I promise you will lose a lot more than your father’s company.”
May you like
She leaned in close, her perfume suddenly smelling toxic.
“You will lose everything, including the true police report from the night your father died.”
