I Blessed Her Wedding With My Life novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Cake Knife
At her sister's wedding Jo's mother hands her a knife and a scripted blessing; Jo refuses, and Tilda cuts her own palm and screams Jo's name.
My mother put a cake knife in my hand in front of two hundred wedding guests.
It was the first sharp thing I had touched in three years.
The silver was cold against my palm.
Her warm hand folded over mine, the way it did when she steadied me on the stairs.
I write with my left hand, so I hold everything with it.
"You look lovely, baby," Mom whispered. "It's only cake. Take your time."
For three years I had eaten every meal with a plastic spoon.
Every Sunday Mom filed my nails down herself, until they couldn't catch on anything.
The bathroom door in my wing of her house had been taken off its hinges, so someone could always see me.
At night she locked my bedroom door from the outside and handed me one white pill in a paper cup.
She said the pill was for sleep, and that all of it was for my safety.
Tonight was my sister Tilda's wedding to Davis Prescott, who had been my own fiancé until three years ago.
Mom had made me practice one sentence for a month.
"I bless this wedding with my life."
"Say it, cut the first slice, and tonight your door finally closes," she had told me. "I promise."
I wanted a closed door so badly that I had said the sentence to the mirror every morning.
Now the ballroom of the Prescott Lake Club had gone silent, and every face was turned toward me.
Tilda stood beside the three-tier cake in her white gown, holding Davis's arm.
She smiled at the cake.
She had not looked at my left wrist once in three years.
Davis winked at me.
He actually winked.
Then I looked past them, because something else in the room was wrong.
The family doctor who signed my pill refills sat at table one, and his plate was empty.
My mother's cousin, a sheriff's deputy, stood by the double doors in full uniform with his hand on his belt.
Nobody wears a uniform to a wedding.
I stood there with a knife in my hand and heard my sentence the way this room would hear it.
I bless this wedding with my life.
Said by a woman with a scarred wrist and a knife, it would sound like a goodbye.
Mom had never told me to practice anything else.
She had never once said what would happen if I said it with a knife in my hand.
I looked at her face, and Helena Alder, chair of the town's Safe Home charity, was perfectly calm.
At the back, by the coat check, a man in a navy suit was watching me.
It was Anson Prescott, Davis's older half-brother.
He had kissed me once on my father's dock, eight days before my wedding, and I had not seen him since.
He looked straight at me and shook his head, once.
"Now, Josephine," Mom said, and her thumb pressed harder.
I thought about the paper cup.
I thought about the bolt on the outside of my door.
I thought about the man at the back who had just said no.
So I put the knife down on the cake table, with the blade turned away from everyone.
Mom's fingers fell off my wrist.
For the first time in three years, nobody was touching me.
I stepped to the microphone.
"I'm not going to say the sentence my mother wrote for me."
A murmur ran through the room.
At the head table, Davis's father set down his fork.
"Three years ago I stood up at my rehearsal dinner and showed you a video of Davis and my sister," I said.
"You were told I was sick. I wasn't sick. I was right."
Davis stopped smiling.
"Jo, sit down," he said through his teeth. "You're making a scene."
"I'm leaving."
Somebody near the front gasped, and a chair scraped.
Mom did not look at me.
She looked at Tilda, and Tilda looked back at her.
It was a short look.
Then Tilda snatched the knife off the cake table.
I thought she was going to hand it back to Mom.
She dragged the blade across her own palm instead.
Blood ran down her wrist and into the white lace of her sleeve.
I lunged and closed my hand around the blade to wrench it away from her.
It bit deep, and the pain shot up my arm.
"She cut me!" Tilda screamed. "Jo, don't! Please don't!"
A glass shattered on the floor.
Two hundred phones came up at once.
Tilda held her bleeding palm high so every one of them could see it, and screamed my name again.
The photographer Mom had hired lifted his camera and the flash went off in my face.
Blood dripped from my own fingers onto the cake table, onto the white cloth, onto the silver ribbon tied around the knife.
Mom pressed a hand to her pearls.
"Oh, no," she said, loud enough for the back row. "Not again."
At the doors, the deputy took his hand off his belt and started to run.
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