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From me, though she never phrased it quite that plainly.
During the wedding planning, she dismissed my mother’s pearls as “costume-looking.” She had Edwin’s favorite dish quietly removed from the reception menu without asking me. She called our family’s longtime venue — the one Edwin and I had married in ourselves, forty years earlier — “a little tired, honestly.”
Anything connected to my husband, or to the life we’d actually built, seemed to genuinely offend her.
Seemed to genuinely offend her.
The truth became impossible to keep pretending away at the rehearsal dinner.
I’d stepped into the restroom off the private dining room, and from inside the last stall, I heard Camille laughing with two of her bridesmaids just outside.
One of them joked that at least I was footing the entire bill for the wedding.
Camille laughed harder than the joke deserved.
“There are a hundred and twenty million reasons to tolerate her,” she said.
A hundred and twenty million reasons to tolerate her.
Then, quieter, meant only for the two of them: once the money actually landed, everything would change. According to her, Miles had already agreed — privately, apparently, without telling me — that they needed real distance from Castlewood. From this house. From me.