I kept to the side mostly, sipping tea, my heart swelling with pride as I watched my granddaughter being pampered for the most important day of her life.
Then, at a little after nine in the morning, it happened. A scream, shrill, piercing, unlike anything I’d ever heard from her, ripped through the house. Cups clattered, people froze, and my heart seized in my chest.
I ran upstairs faster than I thought my old legs could carry me. Lily’s bedroom door was wide open, and inside, my granddaughter was collapsed on the floor, her hands gripping the ruined remains of the wedding dress I had poured myself into for months.
The gown was shredded. The satin skirt was slashed in jagged lines from waist to hem. The lace sleeves hung in tatters. Pearls I had sewn on individually were scattered across the carpet like drops of milk.
It looked as though someone had attacked it with a blade, deliberate and merciless. Lily was sobbing so hard she could barely breathe. “Grandma, who would do this? Why?”
I sank to my knees beside her, my heart in pieces. For a moment, all I could do was stroke her hair and whisper soothing words, though I felt anything but calm.
Rage, sorrow, disbelief, they all churned inside me at once. Who could be so cruel as to destroy a bride’s gown just hours before her wedding?
The family erupted into chaos. Lily’s mother, Anne, accused the caterers of mishandling things. Her father suspected a jealous cousin. The bridesmaids whispered theories. But I knew, as I looked at the clean, sharp slashes in that fabric, that this wasn’t an accident. Someone wanted to stop this wedding.
The first suspicion fell on Hannah, the groom’s ex-girlfriend. She had shown up at the rehearsal dinner uninvited the night before, her eyes red from crying, her words slurred with drink.
She’d cornered Lily in the hallway, begging her to reconsider. “Ethan was supposed to be mine,” she had said, her voice dripping with bitterness.
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