**Internal planning completed.

Story type: TYPE C (Mixed) — clear villain, emotional journey, both justice and healing required.

Total chapters: 10.

Proceeding to output.**

"She didn't get ready for swim season, that's all." — My Son's Fiancée Had Hidden Her Hands for Seven Months.

On the Fourth Day of Our Holiday My Grandson Pulled Her Towel Away and Ran.

My son brought Nadia home last October and I loved her by the end of that first dinner.

She's the kind of girl who notices things.

She remembered that my husband takes his coffee with two sugars — remembered it from one visit, three weeks later, and just handed it to him like it was nothing.

Shy, though.

Sweet-shy.

She'd go red if you thanked her.

Seven months of Sunday dinners and I'd have taken her as a daughter with or without my son.

Then in May he came round on his own and told us he'd proposed and she'd said yes, and I cried in my own kitchen like a fool.

So we booked the coast.

All of us together, a week before the wedding planning really started, to celebrate them properly.

That's the week I started counting.

FIRST day on the beach.

Thirty-one degrees.

Everybody in swimsuits, Nadia in a swimsuit too — legs out, ankles crossed, completely at ease.

And over the top of it, one of those long-sleeved beach cover-ups, buttoned at the wrists.

Plus a towel folded across her lap.

She read with the book propped on her knees.

When Timmy begged her into the water, she went in to her ankles, sleeves pulled down over her hands, arms folded tight across herself.

Second day, same.

Third day, same…

Her legs were bare all week.

Her legs, her feet, her ankles — no cover-up, no towel, no self-consciousness at all.

Everything from the waist up, covered.

Every single day.

And I sat on that beach going back through seven months of my own memory, and I could not produce one picture of that girl's bare arms.

Not at Christmas.

Not at our table.

NOT once.

"She didn't get ready for swim season, that's all," my son said when he caught me looking.

He said it lightly.

He said it much TOO fast.

But that isn't it, and he knows it isn't.

You don't hide from the waist up and lie in the sun from the waist down because you're shy about your body.

I wanted to ask her outright.

I couldn't work out how to do it without sounding like a mad old woman suspecting my son's fiancée.

Fourth day, my younger boy arrived with his family, and my grandson Timmy — he's four — spent all morning circling Nadia, trying to get her to play.

He caught the corner of the towel and pulled, and the cover-up came OPEN with it, and he ran off up the sand laughing with the whole thing trailing behind him.

She didn't notice for a second.

She was still laughing at him — Then she looked DOWN at herself, and she started to scream.

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What did Nadia see that made her scream?