He was breathing through his nose, long, deliberate draws of air, the way he did whenever he was calculating wind shear or checking the load-bearing tolerances on his firm’s restoration blueprints.
“Don’t stop, son,” Margaret said quietly.
She walked beside my right wheel, her posture impeccable, her emerald silk dress catching the coastal breeze.
She had not broken her stride once since she rose from that front pew.
Her silver hair, coiled in an intricate French twist, didn’t have a single strand out of place.
Her expression wasn’t angry; it was worse.
It was the cool, surgical serenity of an old-money Charleston matriarch who had just decided to write someone out of existence.
“Mom,” Daniel’s voice cracked slightly, the boy beneath the thirty-year-old architect bleeding through.
“My car is parked on the north gravel.”
“Leave it,” Margaret said without blinking.
“Arthur is at the curb with the Town Car.
We take Sarah, we go to South Battery, and we close the gates.”
“Wait,” I choked out, finding my voice for the first time since my sister had bent down to whisper that I was an eyesore.
I reached up, my gloved fingers curling around Daniel’s forearm over the pushed-up sleeve of his morning coat.
“Daniel, stop.
Please.
You can’t do this.”
He stopped at the top of the stone ramp that curved down toward the street.
He didn’t look down at me immediately.
He looked out over Meeting Street, where horse-drawn carriages of tourists were clip-clopping past, completely unaware that a six-figure society wedding had just suffered a catastrophic structural collapse sixty feet away.
“I can’t do what, Sarah?”
Daniel asked.
His voice was devastatingly level, but his eyes, when he finally brought them down to meet mine, were bloodshot at the rims.
“Stand at an altar and swear an oath before God to honor a woman who just treated the person who saved her life like garbage to be swept under a rug?”
“She’s scared,” I whispered, the words tasting like ash in my mouth.
Why was I defending her?
Because it was a habit ten years deep.
Because when you burn for someone, you convince yourself that the pain had to mean something noble, or else you’re just a ruined thing that suffered for nothing.
“Emily is… she’s obsessed with how things look.
She has been ever since the fire.
You know how people treated her after it happened.
The pity.
The questions.
She thinks if everything isn’t perfect, people will see through her.”
“I don’t give a damn about her neuroses, Sarah,” Margaret said, her voice dropping into that register that made junior partners at Callahan & Sons weep in their cubicles.
“A woman who views her sister’s sacrifice as an inconvenient aesthetic blemish is not a wounded child.
She is a parasite with good posture.
Now let us get you into the car before Linda comes out here and makes an unseemly spectacle on holy ground.”
As if summoned by the curse of her name, the side door of the church foyer flew open with a violent crack.
My mother burst onto the stone landing, her coral mother-of-the-bride gown clutched in both hands to keep from tripping.
Behind her was Mark, my father, looking like an executioner who had accidentally walked onto the wrong scaffold.
His tie was slightly crooked, his jaw set in that terrible, neutral grimace he always wore whenever Emily threw a tantrum and I ended up apologizing for it.
“Margaret!”
Linda’s voice was pitched high, trembling with social panic.
She didn’t look at me.
She hadn’t looked directly at my face in five years, not since my third reconstructive surgery failed to restore the symmetry of my left cheek.
Her eyes darted from Margaret to Daniel, frantic, assessing the catastrophic calculus of the guest list inside.
“Margaret, please!
Stop this madness right now!
The bishop is waiting.
Senator Vance is in the third row!
The caterers have already set the ice sculptures at the plantation!”
Margaret stopped.
She didn’t turn around quickly; she rotated with the icy grace of a battleship bringing its heavy guns to bear.
“Then go eat the ice sculptures, Linda,” Margaret said mildly.
“They have roughly the same internal temperature as your daughter.”
“How dare you!”
Linda gasped, her chest heaving against her pearls.
“You don’t understand what this day means to us!
