Chapter 1 - The Stain on the Silk
The drive home from Le Avril smelled like spilled Cabernet and ruined dignity.
Daniel had his hands locked at ten and two on the steering wheel, his knuckles bleached white under the amber glow of the highway streetlights. Every two minutes, like a broken grandfather clock striking the hour, he produced another variation of the same useless sentence.
“She’s never done anything like this, Clara. Never. You have to believe me. Something in her must have snapped.”
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. My mouth felt as though it had been packed with dry sand.
On my lap, my hands rested over the heavy, wet front of my dress. It was an ivory silk crepe gown—three hundred dollars from a boutique downtown, tailored to fit my waist so cleanly that when I’d looked in the mirror two hours earlier, I had felt ready to become someone’s wife. Now, the bodice was saturated in deep, bruised purple. The wine had soaked straight through the silk, through my slip, chilling the skin over my breastbone.
Where the heavy glass had struck my collarbone before skittering across the linen tablecloth and shattering on the floor, a dull, thumping ache had begun to form.
“Did you hear what she said, Daniel?” I asked. My voice was dangerously quiet, hovering just above the hum of the tires on the asphalt.
Daniel swallowed hard. His profile was sharp, handsome, and entirely drained of color. “She was hysterical. She wasn't in her right mind. You know how Vivian gets when she feels out of the loop. She felt blindsided by the toast.”
“She said we would have to bury her before this wedding happens.” I turned my head to look straight at him. “She didn’t say she was surprised. She didn’t say her feelings were hurt. She told twenty-two of our friends and family members that she would rather be dead in the ground than let you marry me. And then she threw a rock-heavy crystal tumbler at my chest.”
“The glass slipped,” Daniel said, his voice cracking on the last syllable.
I stared at him. The silence that followed was heavier than the car itself.
“It slipped?” I whispered.
He flinched. He knew how absurd it sounded the second the words left his mouth. He reached across the center console, trying to take my hand, but I pulled my fingers back, tucking them beneath the stained silk of my lap.
“I’m sorry,” he pleaded, his voice ragged. “I’m just... I’m in shock, Clara. My mother is sitting back at the restaurant with a migraine, my father is pacing the parking lot trying to find her, and my sister—my twin sister—just threw a tantrum in front of my future in-laws. I’m trying to make sense of something that makes no sense.”
“That’s the problem, Daniel. You keep looking for logic in cruelty.”
We pulled into the parking garage beneath our apartment complex. When the engine cut out, the silence felt deafening. Neither of us moved for a long minute.
I got out first. I didn't wait for him to open the door, nor did I wait for him in the elevator. I walked into our fourth-floor apartment, went straight into the bathroom, and locked the door behind me.
In the harsh fluorescent light above the vanity, the damage looked worse than it felt. The wine had dried into dark, crusty rings across my chest and abdomen. When I unzipped the dress and let it pool onto the bathmat, I saw the purple-red welt rising near my right shoulder. The glass hadn’t broken against my skin, thank God, but the blunt force had left a mark that would bloom into a deep contusion by morning.
I turned on the shower, stepping beneath the scalding water until my skin turned pink. I scrubbed my hair, my neck, my shoulders, trying to wash away the smell of vintage red wine and the suffocating memory of Vivian’s face.
When she had stood up, she hadn't looked crazy. That was the detail that terrified me most.
People who lose control scream with their eyes wide, their bodies shaking, their anger leaking out in sloppy bursts. Vivian hadn’t been sloppy. When she stood up and gripped that glass, her eyes had been cold, calculated, and dead-level. She had looked at me the way an exterminator looks at a pest that has managed to crawl across the kitchen counter.
I wrapped myself in an old terrycloth robe and walked out into the bedroom.
Daniel was sitting on the edge of the mattress, his head buried in his hands. His phone was resting on the nightstand, its screen illuminating every few seconds with incoming texts.
I didn't have to look to know who they were from.
“Is she at home?” I asked.
Daniel lifted his head. His eyes were red-rimmed. “My dad found her two blocks away from the restaurant. She walked. She wouldn't get in his car. She went back to her condo in an Uber.”
“And your mother?”
“Mom went home. She took a sedative.” Daniel rubbed his temples. “She left me a voicemail. She thinks... Mom thinks we should keep this between us. She said if Lauren or your friends post anything online, it could destroy Vivian’s career. Her company has a strict morality clause for department heads.”
A bitter, dry laugh escaped my throat before I could stop it. “Your sister assaults me in a public dining room, and your mother’s first instinct is public relations?”
“Clara, please—”
Before he could finish, Daniel’s phone lit up again. This time, it wasn't a text. A banner alert flashed across the screen from Vivian’s number.
I stepped closer to the nightstand. Daniel didn't move to hide it, but his whole body went rigid.
The message read:
*If you choose her over me after tonight, Daniel, you don't have a sister anymore. Choose.*
I looked from the glowing screen down to the man I had promised to love for the rest of my life.
May you like
“Well?” I asked quietly. “What’s your answer?”
***
