I had genuinely tried to love her.
After Edwin died, Miles buried himself in grief and work for the better part of two years, and I watched my son disappear a little more each month. Then he met Camille at a hospital fundraiser, and for the first time since the funeral, he looked like someone who might actually be happy again.
She was beautiful. Polished. The kind of charming that photographs well.
The kind of charming that photographs well.
But small things unsettled me early on. Jokes about my age, delivered with just enough sweetness to make objecting look petty. Comments about my clothing that always somehow needed “updating.” The particular way her smile disappeared the instant Miles looked away from her, then reassembled itself the second he looked back.
Every conversation, sooner or later, found its way back to money. Property. The apartment they were planning once they’d “finally gotten some distance” from Castlewood.
From me, though she never phrased it quite that plainly.
During the wedding planning, she dismissed my mother’s pearls as “costume-looking.” She had Edwin’s favorite dish quietly removed from the reception menu without asking me. She called our family’s longtime venue — the one Edwin and I had married in ourselves, forty years earlier — “a little tired, honestly.”
Anything connected to my husband, or to the life we’d actually built, seemed to genuinely offend her.
Seemed to genuinely offend her.
