Chapter 1 - The Scissors
I want to tell you exactly how it happened, because for a long time afterward I couldn't make anyone believe it.
My name is Elena Marsh, and on the night this story begins, I was twenty-nine years old, standing in the grand salon of a Beverly Hills mansion in a long-sleeved lace wedding gown, wearing a thick black braid my mother had made for me that morning.
The salon was everything I still can't quite get used to — a two-story ceiling, gold trim crawling up the walls, a chandelier with more crystals than I could count, and white ivory flowers everywhere, all of it glowing in warm yellow light.
Two hundred guests stood in front of me.
And behind me stood Margaret Whitmore, my new mother-in-law, sixty-eight years old, in a sapphire dress with a pearl necklace, her short sandy hair perfectly set.
I heard the scissors before I understood them.
One clean, loud snip, right at the crown of my head.
I turned around and my hand went up to my hair before my mind caught up, and my fingers found the place where the braid had been.
Margaret was holding it.
My braid, thick and black, dangling from her hand like something she had just won.
She was smiling.
"It's a family tradition," she said, loud enough for the whole room to hear.
I looked down at the floor and held what was left of my hair with both hands, and my lips were shaking, and I was fighting tears in front of two hundred strangers who had come to watch me be happy.
Nobody moved.
Nobody said a word.
I remember thinking, very clearly, that I had never heard of any such tradition, and that Julian had never mentioned one, and that it didn't matter, because no one in that room was going to argue with Margaret Whitmore.
Not the guests.
Not the staff.
Not even me, apparently, because I just stood there.
Then Julian stepped up beside me.
He was in a black tuxedo, and he picked up the microphone from the stand near the string quartet, and I remember thinking he was going to smooth it over, the way he always smoothed things over with his mother.
He didn't look at the guests.
He looked at her.
He looked at his mother the way I had never seen him look at anyone, and he held the microphone up, and his voice was calm in a way that frightened me more than shouting would have.
"There's someone very special I invited tonight," he said.
Then he turned his head toward the entrance doors of the salon.
I followed his eyes.
Margaret still had my braid in one hand and the scissors in the other.
I watched her smile while the doors began to open.
And then I watched it die.
