The first slap came before we had even cut the wedding cake. The second came after I looked directly at my groom and said, “I am not your mother’s servant.”
Thirty men were seated at long banquet tables beneath crystal chandeliers, most of them Daniel Mercer’s relatives and business associates. I was still wearing my wedding gown, my veil perfectly pinned in place, when my mother-in-law, Lorraine, put a silver tray into my hands.
“Now you prove you can be a proper Mercer wife,” she announced. “You pour the whiskey,
