Since this month is all about beginnings, my prompts will be pictures that could start a story. How would you begin?
I hugged my cousin Jared as I walked into the huge reception hall.
“Glad you could make it,” he said.
“I figured I had to come. Your mom wouldn’t speak to me at Thanksgiving if I missed your parents’ anniversary soiree. Where’s Maddie?”
Jared threw up his hands. “Who knows? My parents invited so many people I don’t know that I feel like a party crasher.”
As Jared greeted another relative, I scanned the surging crowd. At a table on the far side of the room, my cousin Maddie sat with a women I didn’t know. Maddie looked as sunny as she always did although I knew she couldn’t enjoy chitchatting with strangers.
Keeping an eye on them, I worked my way through the crowd.
The woman leaned over and whispered something. Maddie’s jaw swung loose, her eyes flew open, and she went as still as stone.
The woman, with her back toward me, left the table.
I hurried over as fast as I could. “Maddie, what happened?”