On my seventy-first birthday, my granddaughter stood at the head of my table and announced, “Starting Monday, I’m taking over the company.” When I told her to apologize, she slapped me so hard my lip split. “You should have died years ago,” she hissed. Twenty-three guests watched in silence. But upstairs, hidden in a cedar box, was the one clause she never knew existed…
Seconds later, her hand struck my face so hard my lip split against my teeth.
I stumbled backward into the mahogany sideboard. My glasses fell and cracked beneath my foot. The ivory blouse I had chosen for my seventy-first birthday began to stain red at the collar.
And the room froze.
No one moved.
Not Natalie’s husband.
Not his parents.
Not the elegant investors she had invited to impress.
Not the women who drank champagne from crystal glasses paid for by my money.
They simply stared.
My name is Beatrice Alden, though most people in Pasadena call me Mrs. Alden. For forty years, I built Alden House Books from a rented office with two desks into one of the most respected independent publishing houses on the West Coast.
My only daughter, Clara, died of cancer at thirty-nine.
She left behind an eight-year-old girl with braids, a pink schoolbag, and a stuffed bunny she could not sleep without.
That little girl was Natalie.
From that day on, I became her grandmother, mother, father, home, shield, and future.
I paid for her school. Her piano lessons. Her summer camps. Her college tuition. Her graduate program in London. Her Napa wedding. The down payment on her Pacific Palisades home.
When she wanted to start a literary agency, I gave her seed money.
When she said she wanted to “modernize” my publishing company, I made her vice president.
When she cried that no one took her seriously because she was “just the granddaughter,” I gave her a chair at the table I had spent decades building.
And on my birthday, she tried to take the head of that table.
The dinner was in my Pasadena home, the same craftsman house where Natalie learned to ride her bike, where Clara used to sit on the porch eating peaches in summer, where every bookshelf still carried my daughter’s ghost.
I had ordered salmon, prime rib, mushroom risotto, green beans, and a vanilla cake with raspberry filling.
I wore pearls.
