I'll Give Her the Rope. She'll Hang Her Own Son.
The number on the invoice was the only thing in focus.
$350,000.
It stared back at me from the crisp, linen-textured paper, a figure so absurd it felt like a misprint, a cruel joke.
The polished smile of the manager of The Silvanus Pavilion didn't waver.
“Is everything in order, Mrs. Shelton?”
Mrs. Shelton.
The name felt foreign on my tongue, a costume I had put on for a party that had just ended in disaster.
I lowered the invoice, the grand, ridiculously opulent ballroom swimming back into view.
Empty tables stood as silent witnesses, draped in white linen that now looked like funeral shrouds.
The air, once filled with laughter and the clinking of champagne flutes, now hung heavy with the cloying scent of wilting flowers and stale victory.
My victory.
Marrying Graham Shelton.
I looked at the breakdown, my finger tracing the obscene lines of text.
One hundred bottles of Screaming Eagle Cabernet Sauvignon, consumed.
Three hundred Maine lobsters, devoured.
One hundred Alaskan king crabs, cracked and emptied.
It went on.
Thirty custom gilded plates, listed under ‘Damages & Replacements’ for $30,000.
Fifty pairs of sterling silver goblets, same category, 4000-100005,000.
The list scrolled down into a hell of artisanal cheeses, imported flowers, even the damned potted ferns from the lobby.
My husband, Graham, materialized beside me, his face pale and slick with sweat.
He tugged at the collar of his bespoke tuxedo, a garment that now looked two sizes too small for his discomfort.
“Annie, what’s wrong?”
I didn’t answer.
I just handed him the paper.
His eyes scanned it, widened, and then he let out a small, strangled noise.
“This… this can’t be right,” he stammered, looking at the manager as if the man himself had committed the crime.
“Our agreement was for a hundred guests, max. This is… this is insane.”
The manager’s smile remained, a mask of professional courtesy.
“Your mother, Mrs. Judith Shelton, made some adjustments to the final arrangements, sir. She invoked the ‘family celebration’ clause and extended the hospitality to a few more… relatives.”
A few more.
That’s what he called the horde that had descended upon our wedding reception like a swarm of locusts.
The distant, grasping relatives from Promise Creek, that decaying town in the heart of the manufacturing heartland Graham had tried so hard to escape.
The ones who looked at my family’s generosity not as a gift, but as a long-overdue debt payment.
Graham fumbled for his phone, his hands shaking.
He dialed his mother.
The phone call was a masterclass in delusion.
“She’s so rich, and she had the nerve to ask us for a ten-thousand-dollar contribution for the wedding?” Judith’s voice, sharp and grating even through the phone’s speaker, filled the cavernous silence of the ballroom.
“That wasn’t a request, Graham. That was an insult. She was trying to see how much she could humiliate us.”
Graham flinched, his eyes darting towards me.
I remained perfectly still, my face a carefully constructed mask of neutrality.
Revenge is a dish best served cold, and mine was flash-freezing in my veins.
“Mom, they drank a hundred bottles of Screaming Eagle,” Graham hissed, his voice a desperate whisper.
“That’s half the bill right there! They looted the place!”
“Looted? Such an ugly word,” Judith scoffed.
“I simply told your aunts and uncles to take what they needed. A little something to remember the day by.”
“That family has more money than God. They won’t miss a few plates. It’s a lesson, Graham.”
“A lesson for these people who think they’re better than us, who think they can buy their way into our family and then nickel-and-dime us.”
My mind flashed back to the scene just hours before.
Judith, holding court by the dessert table, stuffing silverware into her oversized handbag.
An uncle, his face flushed with wine, trying to unplug a floor-standing air conditioner.
An aunt wrapping an entire wheel of brie in a napkin.
They weren't taking souvenirs.
They were pillaging.
“Mom, this is three hundred and fifty thousand dollars!” Graham’s voice cracked.
“We don’t have this money! I don’t have this money!”
There was a pause on the other end of the line, followed by a sound that made my blood run cold.
A triumphant little laugh.
“Of course you don’t, sweetie,” Judith said, her tone dripping with condescending pity.
“But she does. She’s your wife now. Her money is your money. Her debt is your debt.”
“For richer or poorer, remember?”
“Well, today you got a little richer, and she got a little poorer. That’s called balance.”
She hung up.
Graham stared at his phone, his mouth slightly agape.
The sweat on his brow was now a steady trickle.
He tried calling back.
Voicemail.
He tried his aunts, his uncles.
No one answered.
They had vanished, leaving a trail of destruction and a bill the size of a mortgage.
He turned to me, his eyes pleading, pathetic.
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