Chapter 1
Minutes before I was supposed to marry her, I heard my three-year-old daughter crying behind the bridal-room door. Then I heard my fiancée tell her to forget her dead mother.
Our wedding was about to begin at a hotel outside Boston.
Guests were already seated, and the music had started downstairs.
I was walking toward the ballroom when I realized my daughter, Lily, was missing.
She was supposed to be with my sister.
Then I heard a small voice crying from the bridal suite.
“Please stop.”
I froze outside the half-closed door.
My fiancée, Vanessa, was inside wearing the wedding dress I had watched her choose months earlier.
She had one hand tangled in Lily’s hair.
“Look at me,” Vanessa snapped.
Lily was sobbing so hard she could barely breathe.
“You’re going to call me Mom after today.”
“My mommy is in heaven,” Lily whispered.
Vanessa pulled her hair again.
“I don’t care where she is.”
My entire body went cold.
“You have a new mother now, and you’re going to stop talking about the old one.”
Lily covered her face.
“I want Daddy.”
Vanessa bent closer to her.
“If you tell your father about this, he’ll think you’re being a bad little girl.”
That was when I kicked the door open.
Vanessa spun around and immediately released Lily.
I ran past her, dropped to my knees, and pulled my daughter into my arms.
“Daddy!” Lily screamed.
I saw red marks where Vanessa’s fingers had been gripping her.
“What did you do to my daughter?”
Vanessa’s face went pale.
“It isn’t what you think.”
“I heard everything.”
She reached for me and whispered, “Daniel, there are two hundred people waiting downstairs.”
I stood up with Lily in my arms.
“I don’t care if there are two thousand.”
Vanessa grabbed my jacket and hissed, “You are not ruining my wedding because your daughter can’t accept reality.”
Something inside me snapped.
I grabbed the front of her wedding dress and tore the expensive lace straight down the side as she screamed.
“You will never be her mother.”
Vanessa stared at me in shock.
Then Lily suddenly pointed toward Vanessa’s purse on the chair.
“Daddy,” she whispered, “that’s where she put Mommy’s necklace.”
May you like
Vanessa stopped screaming.
And when I opened the purse, I found something beside the necklace that made me realize this had started long before the wedding.
