The morning light filtered through the windows of Martha’s salon with the gentle insistence of autumn announcing itself, catching the silver strands in my hair as she worked her practiced magic with scissors and spray. Outside, the October leaves were beginning their annual performance—gold and crimson against a sky so impossibly blue it looked like something painted by an artist who’d never quite grasped the concept of subtlety. It was the kind of perfect fall day that poets write about and photographers chase, and it was the day my only daughter was getting married.
“Big day today, Sylvia?” Martha asked, her reflection meeting mine in the mirror with the warm familiarity of someone who’d been styling my hair for fifteen years, through gray roots and grief and everything in between. “My daughter’s wedding,” I said, keeping my voice light and pleasant, the tone of a mother who was supposed to be overflowing with uncomplicated joy. “Finally.”
“How exciting!
You must be over the moon.” Martha’s hands moved with practiced efficiency, teasing my hair into something resembling elegance, transforming my ordinary silver into something that looked almost intentional, almost stylish. I smiled the way mothers are supposed to smile on their daughters’ wedding days—serene, proud, perhaps a touch misty-eyed. “It’s certainly going to be memorable.”
What I didn’t say—what I never said to anyone in the two years since Robert died—was how carefully I’d been preparing for this day.
How precisely I’d calculated every detail, from my modest gray dress purchased from a department store clearance rack to the understated pearls that suggested respectability without prosperity. Looking harmless had become an art form I’d perfected over twenty-four months of deliberate invisibility, a performance I’d given every single day without missing a single cue. “Nothing too fancy,” I told Martha as she worked another section of my hair with her skilled hands.
“I don’t want to draw attention away from Emma. It’s her day.”
“Oh, Sylvia, you’re the mother of the bride. You should shine!
This is one of the most important days of your life too.” Martha’s voice carried that particular insistence of someone who believed in traditional celebrations, in mothers who glowed with pride and wore their finest clothes. But shining was dangerous. Shining attracted the wrong kind of attention from the wrong kind of people—the predators, the manipulators, the ones who could smell money the way sharks smell blood in water.
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