My mother stood up, her face red. “Karen! This is enough! Even if—even if there are questions, this is not the time! You are destroying her honeymoon!”
I turned on my mother, the anger finally boiling over. “No, Mom. He destroyed her marriage. I’m just turning on the lights. You watched my daughter get humiliated yesterday and you did nothing because you wanted the perfect picture. Well, here’s your perfect picture. Look at it.”
I pointed at the papers scattered on the table.
Tamson stood up. She was shaking. She looked at the man she had married less than twenty-four hours ago. The man she had promised to love and cherish.
“Did you sleep with her?” Tamson asked. Her voice was deadly quiet.
“Tam, baby, it’s complicated, she’s just a friend who is going through a hard time and—”
“Did. You. Sleep. With. Her?”
Dawson looked around the room, searching for an ally. He found none. Even his own mother was looking at him with horror. He slumped his shoulders.
“It was a mistake,” he mumbled. “It meant nothing. I was scared, Tam. The commitment… I just panicked.”
Tamson looked at the papers in her hand. Then she looked at me. For a second, I thought she was going to scream at me. I braced myself for it.
Instead, she picked up her glass of mimosa. She looked at Dawson.
“Get out.”
“Tamson, we can fix this, we have the flight in three hours—”
“Get out!” she screamed, hurling the glass at him. It shattered against his chest, splashing orange juice and champagne all over his white linen shirt. “Get out of my sight! I never want to see you again!”
Dawson scrambled back, slipping on the wet floor. He looked at his parents, who turned their heads away. He looked at me, his eyes full of hate.
“You happy now, you witch?” he spat at me.
“Ecstatic,” I said. “Don’t forget your gift.”
I gestured to the papers.
Dawson fled. The sound of the heavy glass door slamming shut resonated through the room like a gunshot.
Tamson stood there for a moment, chest heaving. Then she collapsed back into her chair and put her head on the table, sobbing. Not the polite crying she did at movies. Ugly, guttural sobbing.
My mother rushed to her, cooing, trying to smooth her hair. “It’s okay, we’ll fix it, maybe he can explain…”
Tamson shoved her away. “Stop it, Mom! Just stop! It’s over! It’s all over!”
I stood there, feeling strangely hollow. I had won. I had protected my sister from a life of lies, and I had avenged my daughter’s tears. But seeing my sister broken didn’t feel like a victory. It just felt like a tragedy.
I walked over to the table. I placed a hand on Tamson’s shaking shoulder. She flinched, but didn’t push me away.
“I’m sorry,” I said quietly. “I really am. But you deserved to know.”
Tamson lifted her head. Her mascara was running down her face in black streaks. She looked at me, her eyes searching mine.
“Why?” she choked out. “Why did you do this today?”
“Because yesterday, you taught my daughter that appearances matter more than people,” I said. “And today, I wanted to show you that the truth matters more than appearances.”
I turned and walked out. I didn’t stay for the aftermath. I didn’t stay to hear my mother’s excuses or to help cancel the vendors. I got in my car, drove to pick up Willa, and we went home.
The next forty-eight hours were a blur of chaos. Dawson moved in with Meredith—which lasted all of three weeks before she cheated on him, a delicious irony I heard through the grapevine. Tamson filed for an annulment immediately, citing fraud. The eighty-thousand-dollar wedding was dissolved before the photos were even developed.
My mother blamed me. For weeks, my phone rang with voicemails telling me I was jealous, spiteful, and cruel. I stopped listening to them.
Tamson didn’t speak to me. I assumed our relationship was dead, buried under the wreckage of the Golden Vine Estate.
Three months passed. The leaves fell, the air turned bitter cold, and the holidays approached. Willa asked about Aunt Tamson sometimes, but I changed the subject.
Then, one snowy Tuesday evening in January, there was a knock at my door.
I opened the door, clutching my robe tight against the draft.
Tamson stood on my porch. She looked different. The highlights were grown out. She was wearing a puffy coat and no makeup, her nose red from the cold. She looked smaller, younger. Less like a queen, more like the sister I used to share a bunk bed with.
“Can I come in?” she asked, her voice raspy.
