PART 1
On the night I married Grayson, I hid under our bed because I wanted to surprise him.
My satin dress was still on. My veil had caught on the wooden frame above me and I could not free it without tearing something.
And I was lying there on the floorboards trying not to laugh, picturing his face when I crawled out and shouted got you.
It was about half past eleven. He had gone down to see the last of his cousins off.
Then the bedroom door opened.
The footsteps were not his.
They were his mother’s. I know Lorna’s heels the way you know a clock in your own house — I had spent two years listening for them across kitchens.
She crossed that room and sat down on the mattress directly above me.
The springs came down against my back. I could feel the weight of her through about eight inches of foam.
I flattened myself against the floor and stopped breathing properly, and the whole thing turned in about four seconds from a joke into something else.
A lighter clicked.
And then cigarette smoke came drifting down under the bed.
