~My account~
I watched her as she polished the big diamond ring my brother gave her in Paris, a week earlier. There we were, on Dire Island, celebrating the engagement of my brother Myles, and his manipulative, bitch of a fiancée – Indiana.
Problem: I was the only one who saw ‘it’.
‘It’: My brother was about to marry a sociopath.
She was glamourous. She possessed radiating charm. She was charismatic, confident, and socially well-practiced. She told him what he wanted to hear. She was seemingly everything a level-headed man should want. But it was superficial and false.
And so, she was powerful, and so she preyed on him. And as I anticipated, she only married him for her own advantage. I didn’t know what that advantage was until after they were divorced, two years later.
I looked on while she embraced Myles as he walked into the room, and told him yet more about her wedding plans. That ‘her’ was intentional… The wedding really was her own. She picked the entire bridal party except for the best man, walked down the aisle to a song of her own Scottish heritage, and chose all of the decorations, songs, drinks and food. Of course, her friends and family made up the majority of the wedding guests, and enjoyed the best tables at the reception.
“Myles, darling,” she began with avarice in her eyes, and a kiss on his cheek.
“I’ve thought more about the bridal party.” She turned to me.
“Sal! I would love for you to be our ring-bearer! How does that sound sweetie?”
… Did she not understand that I was twelve years old- not two?
I knew why she asked me how it sounded- it was an opportunity to get me to complain in front of Myles. She knew that it miffed me that all the other sisters and brothers were bridesmaids and groomsmen. Myself? I got to be ring-bearer. The role of a toddler.
No- It miffed me to see her drag my untainted brother into the scheme she had concocted. I had to make him understand. I was so desperate to stop him from getting himself wounded. I was unsuccessful.
That night, I wrote him a letter. I had already spoken with him several times, expressing my sincere concerns. But blinded by his love for Indiana, he had always discarded my opinion, and consequently remained naive of the dire consequences of marrying this girl. I figured I might make him think more if I wrote it down.
I left it in an envelope marked, ‘Myles’ in his room, under a satin pillow. Where only he would find it.
But Indiana, as usual, had outwitted me. I was summoned to the lounge room, where my brother was comforting his sobbing bride-to-be, and my father stood cross-armed; livid. He told me I ought to be ashamed of myself, for not inviting Indiana into the family. ‘Attention-seeking princess’ is the term that remains seared into my mind.
Anyway, I was the ‘bad-guy’ from then on. Apparently, I had left the letter, without an envelope, in the doorway to her room.
I know she did something. I was being ‘framed’.
How could the situation have been so corrupted? How could a person have such an incapacity for empathy?
This girl, who we had known as a family friend since she was a child, she was deceptive. She was conniving, and she was deranged. She was a compulsive liar – and my brother was about to marry her. He did marry her. She fooled him, and she destroyed him. She used him and she abused him, and after a while of this, we never saw her again.
