Blake’s mother, Victoria, pressed her expensive linen napkin to her lips, her eyes gleaming with something that might have been pity but looked a lot like satisfaction.
“Amber,” Blake finally murmured, touching her arm gently. “Maybe we should—”
“No, Blake. I’m done pretending.”
Amber shook off his hand, her diamond engagement ring catching the light. “Do you know what Victoria asked me yesterday? She asked if my mother would be comfortable at the country club… or if she’d feel out of place, like I’m some kind of charity case you’re including out of obligation.”
I absorbed that with a strange detachment. After three decades of single motherhood—double shifts and deferred dreams, scrimping and saving to provide dance lessons and SAT tutors and law school tuition—I was being discussed as an embarrassment to be tolerated.
“I see,” I said, my voice steadier than I felt. “And what did you tell Victoria?”
Amber’s silence answered more eloquently than words.
“Amber has been very gracious about including everyone,” Victoria interjected smoothly, her country club poise unshakable. “We simply want tomorrow to go perfectly for both families.”
Both families.
As if my family—just me, really, and elderly Grandma Helen—were somehow comparable to the Prescotts, with their old money and legacy admissions to Ivy League schools.
“It will be perfect,” I assured her, with a smile that cost me everything to produce. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think I need some air.”
I walked out of the dining room with my back straight and my head high, feeling the weight of their stares. Only once I reached the empty ladies’ lounge did I allow myself to sink onto a velvet chair, my hands shaking as the full impact of my daughter’s words hit me.
You’re the worst mother anyone could have.
