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CHAPTER ONE
IT WAS HER DAUGHTER’S wedding day, and Annie Cooper couldn’t seem to stop crying.
“I’m just going to check my makeup, darling,” she’d told Dawn a few minutes ago, when her eyes had begun to prickle again.
And now here she was, locked inside a stall in the ladies’ room of a beautiful old Connecticut church, clutching a handful of soggy tissues and bawling her eyes out.
“Promise me you won’t cry, Mom,” Dawn had said, only last night.
The two of them had been sitting up over mugs of cinnamon-laced hot chocolate. Neither of them had felt sleepy. Dawn had been too excited; Annie had been unwilling to give up the last hours when her daughter would still be her little girl instead of Nick’s wife.
“I promise,” Annie had said, swallowing hard, and then she’d burst into tears.
“Oh, Moth-ther,” Dawn had said, “for goodness’ sake,” just as if she were still a teenager and Annie was giving her a hard time about coming in ten minutes after curfew on school nights.
And that was just the trouble. She was still a teenager, Annie thought as she wiped her streaming eyes. Her baby was only eighteen years old, far too young to be getting married. Of course, when she’d tried telling that to Dawn the night she’d come home, smiling radiantly with Nick’s engagement ring on her finger, her daughter had countered with the ultimate rebuttal.
“And how old were you when you got married?” she’d said, which had effectively ended the discussion because the whole answer—“Eighteen, the same as you, and look where it got me”—was not one you wanted to make to your own child.
It certainly wasn’t Dawn’s fault her parents’ marriage had ended in divorce.
“She’s too young,” Annie whispered into her handful of Kleenex, “she’s much, much too young.”
“Annie?”
Annie heard the door to the ladies’ room swing open. A murmur of voices and the soft strains of organ music floated toward her, then faded as the door thumped shut.
“Annie? Are you in here?”
It was Deborah Kent, her best friend.
“No,” Annie said miserably, choking back a sob.
“Annie,” Deb said gently, “come out of there.”
“No.”
“Annie.” Deb’s tone became the sort she probably used with her third-graders. “This is nonsense. You can’t hide in there forever.”
“Give me one good reason why I can’t,” Annie said, sniffling.
“Well, you’ve got seventy-five guests waiting.”
“A hundred,” Annie sobbed. “Let ’em wait.”
“The minister’s starting to look impatient.”
“Patience is a virtue,” Annie said, and dumped the wet tissues into the toilet.
“And I think your aunt Jeanne just propositioned one of the groomsmen.”
There was a long silence, and then Annie groaned. “Tell me you’re joking.”
“All I know is what I saw. She got this look on her face—you know the look.”
Annie clamped her eyes shut. “And?”
“And, she went sashaying over to that big blond kid.” Deborah’s voice turned dreamy. “Actually I couldn’t much blame her. Did you see the build on that boy?”
“Deb! Honestly!” Annie flushed the tissues down the toilet, unlocked the stall door and marched to the sink. “Aunt Jeanne’s eighty years old. There’s some excuse for her. But you—”
“Listen, just because I’m forty doesn’t mean I’m dead. You may want to pretend you’ve forgotten what men are good for, but I certainly haven’t.”
“Forty-three,” Annie said, rummaging in her purse. “You can’t lie about your age to me, Deb, not when we share a birthday. As for what men are good for—believe me, I know what they’re good for. Not much. Not one damn thing, actually, except for making babies and that’s just the trouble, Dawn is still just a baby. She’s too young to be getting married.”
“That’s the other thing I came in to tell you.” Deb cleared her throat. “He’s here.”
“Who’s here?”
“Your ex.”
Annie went still. “No.”
“Yes. He came in maybe five minutes ago.”
“No, he couldn’t have. He’s in Georgia or Florida, someplace like that.” Annie looked at her friend in the mirror. “You’re sure it was Chase?”
“Six-two, dirty-blond hair, that gorgeous face with its slightly off-center nose and muscles up the yin-yang...” Deb blushed. “Well, I notice these things.”
“So I see.”
“It’s Chase, all right. I don’t know why you’re so surprised. He said he’d be here for Dawn’s wedding, that he wouldn’t let anyone else give his daughter away.”
Annie’s mouth twisted. She wrenched on the water, lathered her hands with soap and scrubbed furiously.
“Chase was always good at promises. It’s the follow-through he can’t manage.” She shut off the faucet and yanked a paper towel from the dispenser. “This whole thing is his fault.”
“Annie...”
“Did he tell Dawn she was making a mistake? No. He most certainly did not. The jerk gave her his blessing. His blessing, Deb, can you imagine?” Annie balled up the paper towel and hurled it into the trash can. “I put my foot down, told her to wait, to finish her education. He gave her a kiss and told her to do what she thought best. Well, that’s typical. Typical! He could never do anything that wasn’t just the opposite of what I wanted.”
“Annie, calm down.”
“I really figured, when he didn’t show up for the rehearsal last night, that we’d gotten lucky.”
“Dawn wouldn’t have thought so,” Deb said quietly. “And you know that she never doubted him, for a minute. ‘Daddy will be here,’ she kept saying.”
“All the more proof that she’s too young to know what’s good for her,” Annie muttered. “What about my sister? Has she shown up yet?”
“Not yet, no.”
Annie frowned. “I hope Laurel’s okay. It’s not like her to be late.”
“I already phoned the railroad station. The train came in late, or something. It’s the minister you’ve got to worry about. He’s got another wedding to perform in a couple of hours, over in Easton.”
Annie sighed and smoothed down the skirt of her knee-length, pale green chiffon dress. “I suppose there’s no getting out of it. Okay, let’s do it... What?”
“You might want to take a look in the mirror first.”
Annie frowned, swung toward the sink again and blanched. Her mascara had run and rimmed her green eyes. Her small, slightly upturned nose was bright pink, and her strawberry blond hair, so lovingly arranged in a smooth, sophisticated cap by Pierre himself just this morning, was standing up as if she’d stuck her finger into an electric outlet.
“Deb, look at me!”
“I’m looking,” Deb said. “We could always ask the organist if he knows the music from Bride of Frankenstein.”
“Will you be serious? I’ve got a hundred people waiting out there.” And Chase, she thought, so quickly and so senselessly that it made her blink.
