PART ONE
My husband served me divorce papers on Christmas Eve while forty of his relatives laughed. His father announced I’d be on the street by New Year’s. I didn’t cry.
I didn’t flinch. I simply slid a matte-black card across the white linen to the waiter and said, “I’m paying for everyone.”
When he saw the name engraved on the card, his face drained of color. The room froze.
They’d spent years mistaking my silence for weakness. But that night—inside a private dining room in Asheford, North Carolina—the bill was finally due. My name is Violet Morris, and I was sitting in the center of a minefield disguised as a Christmas dinner.
To understand why the air went dead, you have to understand the hands that held that card. My hands are not soft. They are not manicured like Celeste’s, nor are they smooth like the women Spencer usually spoke to at his country club mixers.
My hands are rough. The pads of my fingers are permanently calloused, and my cuticles are often stained with dark walnut hull or linseed oil. I’ve been a restoration artist for fifteen years.
I’ve taken furniture other people discarded—chairs with broken legs, vanities with peeling veneer, dining tables scarred by water rings—and I’ve brought them back to life. I run a small but successful business restoring heritage woodwork. I make a good living, enough to support myself comfortably without anyone’s help.
I drive a truck because I haul lumber, not because I can’t afford a luxury sedan. I wear work boots because safety matters more than fashion. To the Hargroves, my work was manual labor, something to look down on.
To me, it was alchemy. I took the broken and the forgotten and gave them dignity again. That was how I was raised.
I grew up in a town so small you could drive through it in two minutes without hitting a red light. My mother raised me alone, and she taught me that dignity was the one thing you couldn’t buy—which meant it was the one thing you couldn’t afford to sell. She used to tell me I should never borrow self-esteem from other people just to trade it for their recognition.
“If you do,” she’d say, “you’ll always be in debt.”
I carried that lesson like armor. I didn’t need the Hargroves to think I was special. I knew who I was.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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