When he proposed, the ring came inside a blue velvet box.
The diamond was so large that I accepted before he had finished asking.
My parents were deeply concerned.
“You’re almost eighty,” Dad told Walter.
“Seventy-eight,” Walter corrected. “I still have two excellent years before ‘almost eighty.’”
Mom turned to me.
“Do you love him?”
“He treats me well.”
“That is not what I asked.”
I looked toward Walter, who was calmly buttering a dinner roll.
“I know enough,” I said.
Walter raised one eyebrow.
For the first time, I wondered whether he understood my real motivation.
The wedding was scheduled for six months later. Walter promised that afterward we would move into his family mansion—a grand stone estate with terraces, twelve bedrooms, and a library with a rolling ladder.
I pictured myself walking down its staircase in silk robes.
Then strange things began happening.
Walter’s Bentley disappeared.
