Chapter 2

The phone had been recording since the chair hit the floor.

Cousin Fen had been standing behind the last guest table near the double doors since the first toast, her slate-blue dress blending with the shadows, her cream shawl draped over one arm, her phone held low in her hand where most people wouldn't notice. She hadn't planned to film. She had raised the phone out of habit, the way you do at a wedding, to catch the moment the couple smiled at each other, to send to the family group chat later. But the chair had crashed backward and the champagne had spilled and Petra had said *look at her*, and Fen had kept the phone up.

She watched the bride point at the empty chair. She watched Rosalind stand in the aisle with the note between her fingers. She watched Nathaniel say "Mom" in a voice that cracked on the single syllable, and she watched Petra turn to him with a smile that was now a warning.

She lowered the phone.

Her thumb hovered over the screen. The recording had stopped. The video was saved. She could feel its weight in her hand, a small rectangle of glass holding everything that had just happened, and she looked down at it and saw her own face reflected in the dark screen, and she thought about what her mother would say.

Fen had been at the house that morning.

She had driven up at nine, two hours before the ceremony, to help with the final fittings. Rosalind's bedroom door had been closed. Fen had knocked, heard nothing, and gone down to the kitchen to make tea. When Rosalind had come down at ten-thirty, her head was bare and her eyes were red, and she had told Fen exactly what she had found when she woke up: her dress cut to pieces on the floor, her jewelry gone from the dressing table, and a folded cream note lying on top of the ruins.

A note that said something.

Fen had seen it. Rosalind had showed it to her, before she folded it and put it in the clutch, before she walked out the door to her son's wedding with nothing on her head. Fen had read the note, and she had felt her stomach drop, and she had said "I'll drive you" even though her hands were shaking.

Now Rosalind stood in the aisle of the ballroom, thirty feet from the head table, holding that note up for the room to see but not reading it. Not yet. And the room had gone quiet because the bride had pointed at an empty chair, and the quiet had a shape to it, a tension that the guests were suddenly aware of, like walking into a room where a fight has just happened.

"I woke up bald this morning," Rosalind said again.