Everyone laughed when they sent an eighty-year-old man and his eighteen-year-old wife off to spend their wedding night together. “Let’s see if Grandpa can make it until morning,” one relative joked through a burst of laughter. He didn’t respond. He simply picked up his old briefcase and closed the door. When six relatives opened it the next morning, they stopped laughing when they discovered what he had been protecting all night.
PART 1
“Let’s see if granddad survives his wedding night!” shouted one of the guests, and the whole reception room instantly burst into roaring laughter.
Eighty-year-old Walter Prescott did not smile at the crude joke.
He remained seated silently next to his newlywed wife, Chloe Bennett, an eighteen-year-old girl who clutched her hands tightly over her white dress as if she desperately wanted to vanish into the fabric.
The wedding was held in a rented banquet hall in Columbus, with thirty guests, loud country music, roast beef, and bourbon.
No one in the room was talking about anything else, given that the retired military officer had just married a young woman who could easily have been his granddaughter.
“Look at her over there,” whispered Nancy, the wife of Walter’s nephew, Brandon.
“She’s not even smiling because she’s probably already calculating how much his house in Indianapolis is worth.”
Brandon let out an awkward, quiet laugh while shaking his head.
“My uncle completely lost his mind, since at his advanced age he clearly needed a hired nurse, not a young bride,” Brandon remarked with a smirk.
Chloe managed to hear their harsh words and lowered her gaze immediately, feeling a single heavy tear run down her pale cheek.
The only person who seemed to notice her distress was Chloe’s age peer, Walter’s granddaughter Hannah.
From across the long table, Hannah observed something the rest of the family completely ignored, noticing how Chloe shrank back every time someone made a suggestive joke, and how she trembled whenever guests tapped their glasses to demand a kiss.
Walter did not look at the young girl the way a groom usually looks at his new bride either.
He watched her with intense alertness, as if he were constantly making sure that no unwanted person got too close to her.
When the rowdy crowd started chanting for them to kiss, Walter simply leaned down and gently kissed Chloe on her forehead.
The room immediately responded with disappointed hisses and loud jeers from the drunker guests.
“That soft peck doesn’t count!” someone shouted from the back of the room.
