PART 1 — THE WEDDING ENDS

The first burst of freezing water struck my mother before I even understood why so many wedding guests were laughing.

By the time I reached her, her gray dress was soaked and clinging to her small frame. Her white hair covered part of her face, and the woman I was supposed to marry was still holding down the trigger of the garden hose.

“Would you look at that miserable woman?” Charles Whitmore, my future father-in-law, called from the terrace.

He lifted his champagne glass as though he were making a toast.

“She looks like she wandered here from a bus station.”

Several guests laughed with him.

Vanessa stood on the lawn in her expensive wedding gown, her cathedral veil flowing behind her. She wore the same amused smile she always used when humiliating someone she considered beneath her.

“Calm down, Daniel,” she said. “I’m only rinsing the poverty off her.”

She aimed the hose again.

The stream struck my mother’s shoulder, forcing her to take a step backward.

I immediately moved between them.

The icy water hit me across the chest, soaking my shirt and jacket. I stared at Vanessa, struggling to recognize the woman I had intended to marry only minutes earlier.

“Put down the hose.”

Vanessa rolled her eyes.

“Don’t destroy the mood. Everyone knows it’s only a joke.”

My mother, Eleanor, gently placed one trembling hand on my arm.

“Danny, please,” she whispered. “Not today.”

Those words hurt more than anything Vanessa had done.

My mother was the one standing there cold and humiliated, yet she was worried that she might ruin my wedding.

Nearly two hundred guests had gathered beneath white silk canopies across the lawn of the Whitmore estate.

Some guests looked away uncomfortably.

Others continued laughing because Charles Whitmore was laughing.

The string quartet had fallen silent. Above us, a drone camera hovered in the air, capturing every second of the scene.