Straight to voicemail.
I sent a message explaining, as steadily as I could manage, that something terrible had happened and that I needed him to call me back immediately.
Camille answered his phone instead.
Camille answered his phone instead.
She told me not to bother him — he was getting dressed, this was his day, surely I understood that. Then she suggested, almost gently, that perhaps I should simply stay home rather than show up “looking for sympathy.”
I opened my closet.
My pale blue mother-of-the-groom dress had been cut into ribbons on its hanger.
My jewelry box, the one that had sat on that dresser for thirty years, was simply gone.
Simply gone.
The security log showed the house alarm had been disarmed at 2:14 that morning and never reset. My housekeeper, Odette, white-faced when I asked her directly, confirmed she’d seen Camille leaving my bedroom hallway sometime after midnight, and had assumed, reasonably enough, that the two of us had simply been talking.
For several minutes I sat on the edge of my own bed, feeling every one of my sixty-eight years land on me at once.
The mirror across the room reflected someone exposed. Someone made small.
Someone made small.
Then something in me shifted.
I had built a company from a leased warehouse. I had buried the only man I ever loved and kept going the next morning anyway. I had survived every genuinely hard thing life had ever put in front of me.
I was not going to let a woman who mistook my patience for weakness finish the job of erasing me. Not on my son’s wedding day. Not in my own house.
I called my sister, Faye.
