Part 1
If you had told me forty-eight hours earlier that I would walk into my own wedding bald, with my father cowering in the front pew and half the chapel looking like they’d seen a ghost, I would have laughed in your face.
Or cried.
Probably both.
But on the morning of my wedding, I woke up in my childhood bedroom in Chesapeake, Virginia, and the first thing I felt was cold air on the top of my head.
It was sharp, wrong, and immediate.
For one confused second, I thought the window had blown open in the night. Then I reached up, still half asleep, expecting the weight of my long dark hair. The hair my mother used to brush every Sunday before church. The hair I had spent months growing carefully for the wedding because Mark loved it loose across my shoulders.
