Chapter 1 - The Scissors Went Through My Braid
I want to tell you exactly how it happened, because people always ask me if I saw it coming.
I didn't.
It was eleven minutes into our reception, in a ballroom full of candlelight and crystal chandeliers, and I was the happiest I had ever been in my twenty-seven years.
I was wearing the white lace dress I'd saved two years to buy, and my hair was in one long braid down my back, red-auburn, past my waist, the hair my mother used to brush when I was small.
Then I heard the scissors.
Not a snip.
A long, deliberate crunch of steel closing through hair, right behind my shoulder.
For one second I thought a decoration had fallen, or a camera strap had caught me.
Then I felt the weight lift off my back.
I turned around, and my new mother-in-law was standing there holding my braid in one hand and the scissors in the other.
Margaret was sixty-five that night, in an emerald green dress and a pearl necklace, her short blonde hair perfectly set, like she'd dressed for a photo shoot instead of her son's wedding.
She was smiling.
She lifted my braid into the air so the whole room could see it, and she said, "It's a family tradition."
The ballroom went so quiet I could hear the string quartet stop mid-phrase.
Two hundred and forty guests, all of them staring at me.
I put my hand up to my head and felt what was left, uneven, shorn, ending somewhere above my shoulder blades.
My mouth opened, but nothing came out.
I looked down at the hem of my dress because if I looked at anyone's face I was going to cry in front of every person Daniel had ever known.
My lips were shaking.
I held what was left of my braid in both hands, the way you'd hold something that had just been broken in front of you.
I want to be honest with you about that moment, because this is the part I'm least proud of.
I didn't say anything.
I had been married for less than two hours, and I had already learned the lesson Margaret wanted me to learn, which was that she could do anything to me in public and I would stand there and take it.
That was the whole point of it.
I understand that now.
I didn't understand it then, standing under the chandeliers with my hand on my ruined hair.
Then Daniel stepped up beside me.
I knew his footsteps the way you know anyone's after three years, and I felt the tuxedo sleeve brush my arm.
He took the microphone from the stand by the band, and I heard the tap of his fingers against it.
When I finally looked up, he wasn't looking at the guests.
He was looking at his mother.
I had never seen his face look like that.
Daniel was the gentlest man I'd ever met, the kind who apologized to waiters when he sent something back.
But the way he was looking at Margaret that night, stern and absolutely still, with the microphone raised, made the hair on my arms stand up.
Margaret's smile didn't move, but something behind her eyes did.
She still had my braid in her hand.
And Daniel lifted the microphone to his mouth.
