“I didn’t mean—”
Her knees buckled.
Michael caught her before she hit the floor.
For several seconds, chaos replaced silence.
Chairs scraped.
Susan’s mother screamed her name.
A nurse among the guests hurried forward.
Someone brought water.
Susan had fainted.
Not when she learned I had money.
Not when she saw herself insulting me.
She fainted when she realized **Michael had already begun seeing through her before the wedding.**
When Susan regained consciousness, she was sitting in a chair near the head table.
Her veil had slipped sideways.
Her perfect makeup was streaked beneath one eye.
She looked at Michael.
“You betrayed me.”
He stared at her in disbelief.
“I betrayed you?”
“You recorded your wife.”
“You weren’t my wife yet.”
The words landed heavily.
Susan blinked.
Michael slowly removed his wedding ring.
They had been married for only a few hours.
“I should have confronted this before today,” he said. “I kept hoping you were stressed. Or scared. Or that once the wedding was over, you’d stop.”
He looked at me.
**“And I let you hurt my mother because I was too afraid to admit I might be marrying the wrong person.”**
That was the first apology I believed.
Not because it fixed anything.
Because it cost him something to say it.
Susan began crying.
Real tears this time.
“Michael, please.”
He shook his head.
“I don’t even know who I married.”
Susan looked at me.
“Janice, tell him this is ridiculous.”
I almost laughed.
For months, she had wanted Michael to manage me.
Now she wanted me to manage him.
“No.”
Her face hardened.
“So this is revenge.”
“No.”
I put Eleanor’s letter on the table.
“This is information.”
“You humiliated me.”
I looked around the ballroom.
“At your wedding?”
She flinched.
I didn’t need to say more.
Her own words had finished the sentence.
Robert touched my arm.
“There’s one other document.”
Even I didn’t know what he meant.
He opened the sealed envelope.
“This was among Eleanor’s private instructions. It was to be given to Janice only after the six-month period ended, and only after she made her first independent decision concerning the estate.”
