“I’m Not Letting Your Poor Family Humiliate My Son At His Own Wedding”
“I’m not letting your poor family humiliate my son at his own wedding,” my fiancé’s mother sneered, blocking the bridal suite door while clutching a prenup like a death sentence. Outside, security was turning my parents away—for being too poor for her aesthetic. In two hours, the world expected a fairy tale.
Instead, I was about to turn this altar into a crime scene and throw the groom out with the trash. My name is Quinn Reyes, and right now, standing in the center of a bridal suite that smells of imported lilies and old money, I am trying to convince myself that I am not suffocating. I am thirty‑one years old.
I am wearing a custom Vera Wang gown that costs more than the house I grew up in, and I am currently watching three makeup artists hover around my face like a bomb squad trying to defuse a live wire. “Just breathe, honey,” one of them whispers, dabbing a sponge near my tear duct. “You’re going to ruin the setting spray.”
I try to inhale, but the corset is a vice grip around my rib cage.
It’s designed to make me look statuesque, but it feels like it’s trying to squeeze the working class out of my body. Just get through today, I tell myself. That has been my mantra for the last six months.
Just get through the rehearsal. Just get through the photos. Just get through the ceremony.
Once I say “I do,” once I am officially Mrs. Colin Ashford, the judgment will stop. The whispers will stop.
I will belong. That is the lie I am feeding myself when the double doors of the suite swing open. Elaine Ashford does not walk.
She glides. My future mother‑in‑law is a vision in champagne silk, her posture so rigid she looks like she has a steel rod replacing her spine. She is sixty, looks forty, and has eyes that could freeze boiling water.
Behind her trails the wedding planner, a nervous woman named Sarah, who is clutching her clipboard like a shield. Elaine does not look at me. She looks at the room.
She inspects the lighting, the flower arrangements, the champagne bucket. Then finally, her gaze lands on me. There is no warmth.
There is no “You look beautiful.”
There is only the clinical assessment of an asset manager checking a portfolio. “Clear the room,” Elaine says. Her voice is soft, but it carries the weight of a gavel strike.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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