Chapter 1 — The Empty Pews

My whole family had crossed ten states, several time zones, and thousands of dollars to celebrate the unborn children of my brother.

But they could not drive two hours down the interstate to attend my wedding.

That was the single suffocating thought going around in my mind as I stood at the back of St.

Jude Chapel, looking at the polished oak pews I had reserved for the people who raised me.

The air smelled of old wood, warm beeswax, and the faintly metallic scent of the discount lilies I had bought myself from a wholesale market.

My mother’s seat in the front row was empty.

So was my father’s.

My brother, Tate Ashdown, and his pregnant wife, Sela, were nowhere.

We were the Ashdowns of a small Texas town — a name I had spent my whole life holding up, and would soon, at last, set down.

Even my grandmother’s lace handkerchief — the one my mother had tearfully promised to bring as my something old — never came.

Chapter 2 — Anchored

From the altar, my fiance, Lennox, turned.

The morning light caught the line of his jaw.

He saw the devastation pooling in my eyes before I could blink it away.

His posture stiffened and his hands closed at his sides, but he did not look toward the empty seats.

He looked only at me, holding me there as though I alone filled the whole echoing room.

I have thought many times since that I married the right man in that one look — that a person who will not glance at the wound others left in you, but keeps his eyes on you instead, is a person worth walking toward.