Happily Ever After Read Online Free Page B

she said, dismissing him. When he was gone, she hurried up the
stairwell.
    The one thing she had determined long ago was that
one could lose anything at all—anything, except one’s pride—and
come back relatively unscathed. She wasn’t about to carry this scar throughout
her lifetime, only to end up bitter and alone at fifty and stealing brandy from
her father’s cabinets.
    No, that wouldn’t do.
    She went to her room, closing the door behind her.
It was meticulous, except for the drawings posted everywhere—on the
dresser mirror, on the walls. They were her drawings, and much to her mother’s
dismay, she hung them everywhere. It was Sophie’s one small rebellion, but she
was proud of every sketch and couldn’t bring herself to bury them in a closet
or in a drawer.
    Sophie never drew things as they actually
appeared. She never truly saw anything the way others did. Everyone—every
thing—had a soul, and she felt it her mission to capture its essence in
her sketches.
    She made her way to her dresser, and touched a
finger to a sketch of her mother she had posted there. Unfortunately, sometimes
her portraits weren’t particularly flattering. She smiled to herself at the
memory of her mother’s expression when she’d first gazed upon her portrait.
Poor dear, she’d practically fainted at the sight of it. Sophie had sketched
her mother’s eyes abnormally large, because she was ever vigilant, and often
affronted. And her mouth was big as well, and her ears... and her nose. Sophie
just hadn’t been able to help herself. Her mother seemed to hear everything,
smell everything, know everything—or at least she made it a point to try.
    Sophie’s sketches would never hang in an art
gallery, but she loved them all—from her re-interpretation of the Mona
Lisa, with her teeth bared in laughter, to the tiny sketch of her cherished
shark’s tooth that hung over her bed like a halo-crowned portrait of the Virgin
Mary. Sophie turned to consider the sketch. It was all she had left of the
shark’s tooth. Her mother found the tooth one morning and discarded it long
before Sophie had awakened—because it wasn’t seemly to play with the
dirty teeth of dead animals, she’d been reprimanded.
    Sophie still missed her little talisman. In some
strange way, the little tooth had embodied all her hopes and dreams—not
the ones she had been schooled to, but those she’d tucked away in the farthest
reaches of her soul, deep down inside where not a single ray of light could
expose their imperfections ... or hers. The truth was that she wasn’t
perfect—never would be—and she knew it.
    Just once, she wanted someone to look beneath the
facade and see all the imperfections ... and cherish her anyway.
    She lifted up the portrait from her desk –
the one she had sketched of Harlan, touching the chin with a finger. She had
drawn him perfectly.
    This portrait, along with the only drawing of hers
that her mother had hung in the hall, were the only two paintings Sophie had
rendered to absolute perfection. Simply titled The Wedding Day, the one in the
hall was a storybook picture—her wedding day as Sophie had often
envisioned it. Since childhood, her mother had woven every precise detail for
her, until the vision had reached an almost sanctified perfection. The pristine
white gazebo, decorated with pure snow-white ribbons. The golden rays of
sunshine penetrating a vibrant, rich green canopy of trees… shining down on the
faceless couple within the gazebo. The rays had been so brilliant as they’d
shone on the wedded pair that it had washed away every detail in their faces,
rendering them completely without identity.
    She sighed. Maybe she’d always known that destiny
was not hers.
    Glancing first at the letter in her hand, she
frowned at the picture she held and then set it back down upon the dresser.
Turning it over, she removed the wooden back, and set it, too, down on the
dresser. She folded Harlan’s letter neatly and lay it