Serendipity's Footsteps by Suzanne Nelson

Author:Suzanne Nelson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2015-11-09T16:00:00+00:00

BEA

Bea couldn’t go through with it. She stood in front of the full-length mirror, staring at the terror-stricken face peering back at her. There was no expectant awe washing over her, like her mother and friends said it would. There was only suffocation as she was sucked under a flood of silk and pearl beading. This was not her dress; it had been handpicked by her mother, altered and delivered to their front door without Bea ever once uttering a word about it. This was not her engagement ring; it had belonged to Gerald’s grandmother, a family heirloom that he’d had resized to fit her finger. It felt foreign on her hand—heavy, cold, and impossibly tight. And these pale pink shoes on her feet. They would never be hers. They would always belong to her mother. Her mother, who’d worn them on the day she married her father. Who’d worn them for him on every wedding anniversary until he died. These shoes belonged to a woman who loved. And there was one thing Bea knew with certainty. She did not love Gerald Hawthorn. She never would.

When her mother had brought her the shoes, Bea had hesitated. The last time she’d seen them, her mother had slapped her for getting a red wine stain on one toe. The shoes had been cleaned since then, and there was only the faintest trace of the wine left. To the untrained eye, the stain would never be noticeable.

“Here,” her mother had said, all business. “Your father would’ve wanted you to wear them on your wedding day.”

“No, Mom. I can’t. They’re yours. They mean too much to you.”

Her mother had shaken her head. “No.” Her glance skimmed over the shoes. “I don’t know why I held on to them, except to keep them for you. Ridiculous, really, to get attached to a silly pair of shoes.”

Her mother’s nonchalance when she gave Bea the shoes made wearing them even more excruciating. Had she forgotten what true love felt like, or had she just buried the memory so deep it had become distorted in her mind?

Bea glanced at herself in the mirror again, cringing at the sight of the shoes. The nausea came on violently, sending her flying to the bathroom. She barely made it in time. She was patting her face with a towel when her mother came in.

“Nerves?” She arched her eyebrow in a way that dared Beatrice to offer up another explanation.

“Yes,” Bea muttered. She knew her mother had noticed her rounded waistline, tightening skirts, and lack of appetite. Her mother also knew about Bea’s short-lived fling with Harvard-dropout-turned-musician Luke Tannen. Benjamin, her stepfather, hadn’t been home from his business travels often enough to notice the romance or the effect it had on Bea’s waistline. And Bea was positive her mother had never mentioned it to him. Instead, her mother had pushed the idea of marriage to a “more acceptable” young man, and she’d done it with such subtlety that Benjamin had never questioned the lightning-fast courtship and hurriedly arranged wedding.

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