Chapter 1 — Walk Yourself Down the Aisle

My father laughed at me, out loud, in front of two hundred guests, in the quiet stone chapel in Savannah where I was about to be married.

“Go on and walk yourself down,” he said, and he pitched his voice to carry to the very back pew, so that no one would have the mercy of not hearing it.

“That’s what happens when you insist on marrying a total nobody.”

And then my father turned his back on me, and walked to the last row, and sat down beside my mother, who kept her head lowered and would not lift her eyes to meet mine or anyone else’s.

I stood frozen at the double doors in my heavy ivory gown, gripping my bouquet so hard that the green stems bent and broke under my fingers.

Up at the altar, Lucas was waiting for me.

His face was pale.

But his steady blue eyes never once left mine, not for a single second, and there was something in them that was not humiliation and not anger, something steadier than either, that I did not yet have a name for.

I had thought, when my father refused at the last moment to give me away, that his cruelty had finally reached its limit.

That the public humiliation was the whole of what he had come there to do.

I was wrong about that, the way I had been wrong about my father my entire life.

His cruelty had not reached its limit.

It had not even, yet, begun.

I have wondered, since, whether some part of me sensed that — whether the frozen half-second I spent at those doors, gripping a bouquet hard enough to break the stems, was my body understanding before my mind did that this was not the end of anything, but the beginning.

I don’t think it was.

I think, standing there, I felt only the ordinary, enormous, private grief of a daughter whose father has just chosen, publicly and finally, to shame her rather than stand beside her on the most important day of her life.

That grief was real, and it was complete in itself, and it deserves to be named before the story gallops off into everything that came after, because the everything-after has a way of making people forget the simple wound at the center of it.