MONEY LOVE OR PLEASURE

All of her warm, salty tears would have easily filled the antique, crystal flutes meant for bubbling with California’s best, chilled champagne. The guest list at Rachel’s wedding was packed with old money and Fortune 500 heirs and heiresses and their wealthy parents seeking business alignments to build wealth for their families and their offspring.

They would celebrate her arranged wedding with endless toasts of their champagne, not her tears. They would spend the entire social affair strategically mixing and mingling, seeking the same types of financially successful unions for their sons and daughters.

Love was never a consideration. It was always about increasing wealth with a business deal marriage to last forever. For anyone else, it would have been one of the best days of her life. For her it was just another expectation that she was expected to accept and fulfill without complaint or question. It was the continuation of a role she had to play.

She sat on her enormous bed in her room in her father’s luxurious sea-side mansion for the last time. She took out her journal and began to write her heart out. If the pages had mouths, they would be screaming her anger, lamenting her sadness, uttering her prayer for a different outcome, and crying out with her plea for strength and guidance. With each touch of her pen to her page, she sought solace.

“It has been quite a while since my mother passed when I was nineteen. Since then I have fallen in and out of love and chased my dreams for the life I wanted. This is not it.”

She shut the book and locked it...she had found new strength with each word. She dried her tears and packed her bag.

If she went through with this wedding, she would be trading one jailer for another. This would come first with her domineering father and then, to replace him, with Kurt, a cold, rude, possessive groom who was ready to enter their new marriage with several mistresses already.

She had met Kurt three times before she became engaged to be his wife. First, he was in attendance at her father’s annual Winter Ball, a high society affair that she was expected to host in her mother’s absence. On that initial meeting, he was aloof and seemed to busy himself with making political alliances and standing with the old boys’ network her father was part of. Though she had tried to engage him in conversation, he was more focused on drinking whiskey, smoking cigars, and ogling the scantily clad women that circled the ballroom.

At their second meeting, he was invited to a state dinner at the White House and asked her to be his escort. He took her to Washington D.C. on his private jet and hardly uttered ten words the entire flight from California. What could have been an opportunity to get to know him better, transformed into a reason to dislike him even more. She felt like she was to be at his service the entire time, the glittering accessory demonstrating how profoundly rich and politically connected he was.