My Stepsister Ran From the Wedding, So My Stepmother Sold Me to the Man Who Hates Her Mother novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Veil
In the bride's room of Star of the Sea church, Nina finds the runaway note, her stepmother sells her the lease threat, and she puts the veil on herself; at the altar Marcello says she is Delia Voss's daughter.
The wedding gown stood on its dress form in the bride's room with a note pinned to the bodice.
"I can't. Tell Marcello I'm sorry."
I had come to the church forty minutes early to zip my stepsister into that dress.
I looked at the note in my hand, and the dress was empty.
Her sandals were gone from under the chair.
Her phone was gone from the vanity, and the window was latched from the inside.
"Where is she?" said the bridesmaid by the door.
Nobody answered her.
My stepmother came in behind her and took the note off the pin.
She is fifty-two and has her hair set every Thursday, and she held that paper the way she holds a bank statement.
She read it once.
Her face did not change at all.
I noticed that, standing there in my black work dress with ice-pick nicks on my hands.
Carmela should have screamed, or sat down, or called for my father.
She turned the note over in her fingers and looked at the bridesmaids.
"Out," she said. "All of you. Now."
They went, with their bouquets and their phones, and one of them looked back at me.
Carmela shut the door and turned the lock.
Across the room my father sat in his wheelchair beside the radiator, with his blanket on his knees and his faded Scalise Shrimp cap in his good hand.
He hasn't spoken since his stroke three years ago.
His eyes were on the dress form, and then on me.
"Nina," Carmela said. "Sit down."
"We have to find her," I said.
"We don't. She isn't coming back today, and she isn't the one he signed."
"Signed what?" I asked.
She set the note on the vanity, took a folded packet out of her handbag and put it beside it.
The pages were thick and creamy and stapled in the corner.
I did the dock's books on weekends, so I read it standing.
Marriage between the Bellanca house and the Scalise bride.
Three years, no early end by either party.
The Scalise dock to keep its Pier 19 lease and its cold-storage rates for the term.
At the bottom, in blue ink: Carmela Scalise, for the family.
I read it again looking for a first name.
There wasn't one.
"It says the Scalise bride," I said.
"It does."
"It doesn't say Priscilla."
"It does not." Carmela smoothed her jacket. "Marcello Bellanca never asked which of you."
"That's insane."
"That is Galveston," she said. "He wants a wife from the old dock families to close the feud over the Pier 19 deed. He's thirty-seven and he doesn't care about her face."
Out in the church, an organ started on the first bars of something.
Four hundred people were sitting in those pews, and half of them worked for one of our two families.
"If he walks out of this building with no bride, the lease goes," Carmela said. "The cold-storage rates go, and every boat on that dock pays triple for ice by Friday."
"Then tell him Priscilla ran."
"And he'll take the lease and the dock. You know the Bellancas."
I looked at my father.
He was looking at his hand on the cap.
"The boat goes," Carmela said, quieter now. "The Mary Ignazia. Your father's last boat. The house goes. Half the deckhands you grew up with don't get paid on Monday."
She meant the deckhand who had taught me to splice line.
She meant the brothers who ran the next boat over, and every man who had ever carried me on his shoulders along that dock.
I thought about the lease on the wall of the Pier 19 office, with its brass frame and its coffee stain.
I thought about my mother's name on a hospital badge in a box in my closet.
"No," I said.
"Nina."
"I won't marry a man who doesn't know my name. Find another way."
Carmela stepped closer.
"There isn't one. You think I don't want one?"
I did think so.
I thought she hadn't looked for one for even a second.
"He believes whoever walks down that aisle is that woman's daughter," she said.
"What woman?"
She waved her hand.
"That woman. The one who ruined his father. It doesn't matter what he believes. He wants a Scalise at the altar, and the lease holds for three years."
My father made a sound.
It was a low, thick sound from the left side of his mouth, and he lifted his good hand and let it fall.
I crossed the room and knelt by his chair.
"Papa."
His fingers closed on my wrist, right over my mother's thin steel bracelet.
He squeezed twice, hard.
Then the organ stopped and began again, louder.
I stood up and took the veil off the dress form.
It was lace, and heavier than I'd guessed.
"Nina," Carmela said, and for the first time her voice was not quite level.
I pinned the veil onto my own hair with the pins from Priscilla's vanity, while my stepmother watched.
I did not look at her again.
I picked my father's cap up off his knee, put it on the back of his head, and pushed his chair to the door myself.
"Open it," I said.
She opened it.
In the hall the bridesmaids were huddled by the font, and I heard Carmela tell them, low and fast, that Priscilla had surely gone out on the old red-striped boat.
I did not know which boat she meant.
The walk down that aisle was the longest of my life.
Four hundred faces turned, and the whispers ran ahead of me to the altar.
My father's chair rolled beside me.
At the front stood a man in a charcoal suit, with his back as straight as a mast.
Marcello Bellanca was taller than I remembered from the dock.
His hair was black and cut close and gray at the temples, with a pale scar through his left eyebrow.
The dock called him the Ice King of the Strand, and I had never once seen him smile.
He turned and looked at the bride.
I stopped on the top step.
He raised his hand to lift the veil and stopped, with his fingers an inch from my cheek.
The lace brushed my skin where he held it, and he did not touch me.
He lifted it back, and he saw my face.
Something went across his eyes and was gone.
"You are Delia Voss's daughter," he said, for me alone.
His voice was very quiet.
Beside him the priest was opening his book.
"I'm not," I said.
"Then you're a worse liar than she was."
He took my hand in his, the first time he had touched me, and held it cold and steady.
And he turned to the priest and said, "Go on."
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