Chapter 5 - The Weight of Permission
I thought it was over.
I stood there in the blinding brilliance of five hundred and twenty diamonds, the adrenaline slowly ebbing out of my bloodstream, leaving behind the dull, throbbing ache of the slap on my cheek. Daniel reached out, his hand trembling slightly, his fingers outstretched to touch my shoulder.
"Emily," he breathed, relief flooding his features. "Thank God you're safe. Let's... let's get you away from here. We can fix this. We can still have our day."
I didn't lean into his touch. Instead, I took a deliberate, quiet step back.
Daniel’s hand paused in mid-air. His expression shifted from relief to sudden, jarring confusion. "Emily?"
"When your sister slapped me," I said, my voice dangerously calm, "why did nobody move?"
Silence descended on the front of the chapel once more. The groomsmen shifted uncomfortably. Margaret looked down at her shoes.
I turned my gaze slowly toward Daniel’s father, Richard Ashford, who stood frozen by the front pew with his hands clasped behind his back.
Because when Victoria had raised her hand to strike me, and when she had picked up the candle lighter, Daniel had instinctively lunged forward to stop her. But Richard hadn't. In fact, Richard had reached out and grabbed Daniel’s arm, holding him back just long enough for the disaster to unfold.
I remembered the exact words Richard had muttered to his son in that frozen second, because my ears had caught them over the organ prelude: “Wait. A second is a very long time when someone is a fool. Let her learn her lesson.”
Richard thought he was teaching me a lesson. He thought my cheap dress would burn, that I would humiliate myself, that I would run crying out of Hawthorne Manor, leaving Daniel free to marry the daughter of a British railway tycoon they had been courting behind my back.
"Richard," I whispered, the name tasting like ash in my mouth. "You didn't try to stop her. You wanted her to burn the dress off my back."
Daniel stared at his father, his eyes widening in horror. "Dad? Is that true? Did you... did you let her do that?"
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Richard swallowed hard, his face flushing a deep, mottled crimson. "Daniel, be reasonable. We just thought... a little reality check—"
"A recess," the elderly parish priest announced nervously from the altar, slamming his prayer book shut. "We will take a... a brief recess in the vestry."
