Chapter 1 - The Blow
"You’re blocking everything, Grandma. You should have died years ago."
That was what my granddaughter, Natalie, shouted at me in front of twenty-three guests.
Seconds later, her hand struck my face so hard my lip split against my teeth. The sharp, cracking sound of flesh meeting flesh echoed like a gunshot in the expansive, high-ceilinged dining room of my Pasadena home.
I stumbled backward, my balance failing, and crashed heavily into the mahogany sideboard. The delicate crystal glasses arranged there rattled ominously. My reading glasses, the ones with the thin gold frames I’d worn for a decade, fell from my face and cracked beneath my own desperate, scrambling foot.
The ivory silk blouse I had chosen specifically for my seventy-first birthday began to stain a dark, wet red at the collar. The metallic taste of blood flooded my mouth.
And the room froze. Completely, terrifyingly froze.
No one moved. No one rushed to my side.
Not Natalie’s husband, Graham, who sat there swirling his expensive bourbon, a faint, smug smirk playing on his lips.
Not his wealthy, aristocratic parents, who simply watched me bleed with the detached curiosity of people observing a minor car accident on the freeway.
Not the elegant investors she had invited to impress, nor the women who drank expensive champagne from crystal glasses paid for entirely by my money.
They simply stared.
My name is Beatrice Alden, though most people in Pasadena call me Mrs. Alden. For forty grueling, glorious years, I built Alden House Books from a rented, drafty office with two mismatched desks into one of the most respected, powerful independent publishing houses on the West Coast. I was a titan in a world dominated by men.
May you like
But kneeling on the floor of my own dining room, clutching my bleeding face, I wasn't a titan. I was just an old woman who had finally realized she had nurtured a monster.
|
