Chapter 1 The First Time
The afternoon light came through the tall windows of the Fairmont Hotel ballroom in long amber bars, and I stood at the altar in a dress my mother had paid for with money she did not have, waiting for a man who was not coming.
I did not know that yet. At four o'clock I still believed. At four fifteen I still believed. At four forty, when the string quartet had played the same three movements twice and my cousin Dana had started checking her phone with the grim focus of a woman watching a car crash, I understood.
The doors at the back of the ballroom opened. Every head turned. It was not Julian. It was his best friend, Marcus Reiner, walking up the aisle with his tie loosened and his face the color of wet paper. He stopped three feet from me and did not look at my eyes. He looked at my shoes.
"He's not coming," Marcus said.
The room made a sound like a wave pulling back from sand. Two hundred and forty guests, most of them Julian's family's people, most of them holding champagne they had not yet sipped. I heard my mother's chair scrape. I heard someone's fork hit a plate.
"Say it again," I said.
"He said... he said he can't do this. He said you'd understand."
I understood. I understood perfectly. Julian Voss, heir to the Voss Foundation and its twenty-two billion in old Connecticut money, had decided that the girl from the wrong side of the harbor was not worth the scandal after all. His mother had been working on him for months. I had watched her do it, at dinners where she passed me the bread basket with two fingers, at the engagement party where she introduced me as "Julian's friend."
I did not cry. That is the part people still talk about, years later, in certain rooms in that city. I did not cry.
I reached up and took the pearl clip out of my hair, one of the ones his grandmother had given me. I set it on the altar rail. Then I walked down the aisle, past Marcus, past both families, past the photographer whose camera had gone dead in his hands.
Outside, the harbor wind hit me and my dress was suddenly just a dress, expensive and stupid and mine. My mother caught up at the valet stand. She was crying. She never cried.
"Cora," she said. "Cora, we can fix this."
"No," I said. "We can't."
That was the first time.
