Chapter 2 - Beth's Warning
Three weeks earlier, Daniel had announced the engagement over Sunday coffee in the sunroom, where I served cinnamon toast on the dented silver tray his father bought at a church auction. Vanessa touched my hand, praised the Whitmore Foundation, and said she wanted a simple wedding because “love should be simple.” She spoke quietly around me, remembered my medication schedule, and never entered a room without asking whether I needed anything. Beth Mercer, my house manager of nineteen years, described another woman afterward. She said Vanessa called the staff lazy, ordered Owen the gardener to wipe mud from her shoes, and became charming only when family entered the room. Laurel, one of the maids, avoided my eyes when I asked whether it was true. I mistook her silence for fear. Daniel called it wedding stress. I called it a warning he was too lonely to hear. Standing in the foyer with water soaking my stockings, I believed the disguise had finally settled the argument. Yet Vanessa did not ask why I had deceived her. She did not plead with Daniel or apologize to me. She kept repeating one strange demand. “Ask Beth. Ask what she's been telling everybody.” It was too precise for panic. Daniel told her to explain, but she stared past him toward the service corridor, where Beth had appeared without making a sound. Beth's expression held no real surprise at all. She merely looked at the recorder in my pocket and said, “Mrs. Whitmore, you should turn that off before this gets uglier.”
