Prologue
When I looked back later on the memories of the Christmas I was twelve, one of the images fixed most firmly in my mind was of that Saturday evening, two days before the wedding, when I found Heather wearing her fairy-tale wedding dress and lying flat on her back beside the bed in her suite at Maricopa Manor. Her balayage hair lay sprawled around her head, and she was facing the little Christmas tree on the stool in front of the window. Her arms stuck out straight from her sides, and her head was turned away from the door, so that when I walked in, it looked at first like she had fallen—or something.
Shocked, I hurried over to her, feeling relief at seeing that she appeared to be still breathing, but confused because—why was she on the floor?
As I got closer, I could see that Heather had her eyes open, and she was staring at the Christmas tree with a vacant look in her eye, as if imagining a beautiful, perfect future that would always elude her grasp. “Are you all right?” I asked.
“What’s wrong?” I asked as I pushed my brown hair back behind my ear and knelt beside the disheveled bride-to-be.
Heather took a deep, shuddering breath and said, in a miserable tone, “Oh, Cassandra, I’ve never been happy.”
“You haven’t?” I said, taken aback. “Not ever?”
“No,” Heather said, “never.”
“But you seemed happy when you were talking about the wedding plans with Mason,” I said.
“No, not even then,” Heather said, then added with a dramatic shiver, “especially not then.”
Heather turned her head to look at me, and as I saw her red-rimmed eyes and the pink blotches on her cheeks and neck, it occurred to me that this might have been the strangest—and most exhilarating—week of my life. In the time since I met Julian at the bookstore after school on Monday and learned about Mason and Heather’s Christmas wedding plan, virtually every hour had brought a fresh disaster. I wondered how I had become so instrumental in making the wedding happen. And I wondered if I’d ever see Julian or any of them again after all this was over.
But most of all, I wondered how I was going to get Heather up off the floor.
Sale
Sale
