“You’re in the way, Grandma. You should have died years ago.”
That is what your granddaughter Valerie screams at you in front of twenty-three guests, seconds before her hand cracks across your face so hard your lip splits open against your teeth.
You stumble backward into the mahogany sideboard. Your glasses fall beneath you and snap under your weight. The ivory silk blouse you bought for your seventieth birthday blooms red at the collar, while everyone in your dining room freezes as if they have just witnessed something too ugly to understand.
No one moves.
Not Valerie’s husband.
Not his parents.
Not the polished investors she invited to impress.
Not the women who call themselves her friends and sip champagne from crystal flutes paid for by your money.
They only stare.
Your name is Margaret Whitmore, though most people in your neighborhood in Pasadena, California, call you Mrs. Whitmore. For forty years, you built Whitmore House Publishing from a rented office with two desks into one of the most respected independent publishers on the West Coast.
Your only daughter, Lucy, died of cancer when she was thirty-nine.
She left behind an eight-year-old little girl with braids, a pink backpack, and a stuffed rabbit she could not sleep without.
That little girl was Valerie.
From that day forward, you became her grandmother, mother, father, home, shield, and future. You paid for private school, ballet lessons, summer camps, college at USC, a master’s program in London, her wedding at a vineyard in Napa, and the down payment on a house in Pacific Palisades.
When she wanted to start a literary agency, you gave her the seed money.
When she said she wanted to “modernize” your publishing company, you made her vice president.
When she cried that people did not take her seriously because she was “just the granddaughter,” you gave her a seat at the table you had spent decades building.
And now, on your seventieth birthday, she has taken that table from you too
