The Final Page
My son called me from an airport at 9:14 on a Sunday morning.
I know the exact time because I was standing at my kitchen counter in Wilmington, waiting for the toaster, and I looked at the clock on the stove when the phone rang. I remember thinking, Cullen never calls this early.
“Mom! Big news.”
There was noise behind him. Rolling suitcases. A woman’s voice on a loudspeaker saying something about Gate 14.
“Blythe and I got married yesterday.”
The toast popped up.
I didn’t touch it.
“You… what?”
“We got married! At the Carolina Yacht Club. It was beautiful, Mom. Honestly, the best day of my life.”
I set my coffee cup down on the counter very carefully, the way you set something down when your hands stop feeling like your own.
“Yesterday,” I said.
“Yesterday.”
“How many people were there?”
He hesitated. Just for a second. But I’m his mother. I heard it.
“Forty-six. Just close friends, Mom. People with status. Blythe’s parents’ people, mostly, and some of my clients. You’d have hated it, honestly. All that small talk. Nobody you’d know.”
People with status.
I stood there in the kitchen where I’d packed his school lunches for twelve years, holding a coffee cup that said WORLD’S OKAYEST MOM, which he’d given me as a joke when he was nineteen.
Forty-six guests.
I wasn’t one of them.
“Mom? You there?”
“I’m here.”
“Okay, so listen, our flight to Maui is boarding in a few minutes. But I wanted to tell you, when we land back on the 26th, we’re going straight to the point.”
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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