Mother of the Bride and Other Wars

The first war began with a seating plan and a dead woman’s handwriting. It was not the dramatic sort of war, not at first. No one threw a vase, no one fainted beautifully into the arms of a man with a square jaw and an inconveniently available inheritance, and no one announced a secret pregnancy over smoked salmon. It began, as most family wars do, with a woman standing alone in a kitchen at midnight, holding a piece of paper that should have been blank.