Chapter 1: The Sound of Silence
My name is Myra Kesler, and I am thirty-three years old. On a crisp Mother’s Day evening, standing before a sea of six hundred elegantly dressed guests at my mother-in-law’s annual charity gala, my husband struck me across the face.
The impact was a sharp, flat crack. The microphone stationed on the nearby mahogany podium caught the violence, broadcasting it through twelve ceiling-mounted speakers. Every cascading crystal in the ballroom’s chandeliers seemed to absorb the suffocating silence that immediately swallowed the room. Then, Judith Kesler—the matriarch, the architect of this misery, and my mother-in-law—slowly raised her crystal flute of champagne. A ripple of nervous, sycophantic laughter cascaded from the front tables.
I stood there, the metallic tang of blood pooling against my bottom lip, my cheek burning with a heat that felt as though it were radiating from my very skull. I did not weep. I did not scream. As I stared at their amused, glittering faces, a singular, crystalline thought anchored my mind: None of you have the slightest idea who my mother is.
