Chapter 4 - The Witnesses to a Lie
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"Natalie is just very tired," Cole said quickly, stepping forward and attempting to control the narrative. "The pregnancy has been extremely difficult for her physically. She is highly emotional today."
I turned slowly toward him, my expression blank. He couldn't meet my gaze and looked down at his glass instead.
That was the precise moment I finally understood something I had been desperately trying not to understand for months. My daughter had not simply been living inside a difficult, unhappy marriage.
She had been living inside a carefully constructed, meticulously arranged trap.
And all the wealthy, influential people who thought they were simply celebrating the impending birth of her baby had been gathered in that ballroom because Lucinda and Cole desperately needed powerful witnesses for their lie.
The extravagant baby shower had been Lucinda’s aggressive idea from the very beginning.
Natalie had explicitly asked for something small. A quiet lunch with close friends. Her cousins. A few classic baby books. A simple cake shaped like a crescent moon. Natalie had never cared for expensive, ostentatious rooms or massive guest lists. She was a high-school art teacher, the kind of woman who quietly spent her own modest salary on expensive watercolor sets for students who could not afford them. She loved quiet, simple things: rainy Sunday afternoons, smelling old bookstores, drinking from hand-painted mugs, and finding pressed flowers tucked inside old journals.
Lucinda had dismissed all of that, calling it "charming but hopelessly impractical."
May you like
Cole had agreed with his mother, calling it "something we could easily upgrade to reflect our status."
So, the small, intimate lunch was forcefully transformed into a formal ballroom event at the Meridian Hall hotel, arguably one of the most expensive and exclusive venues in the entire city. The guest list artificially swelled from twenty people to nearly two hundred. The invitations were professionally printed on heavy, imported cream paper with embossed gold lettering. The catering menu included imported exotic fruit, vintage champagne, miniature artisan cakes, and a live six-piece string quartet.
