One had spent eighteen years needing me.

The other, in eighteen months, had simply loved me.

I walked down that aisle wearing another woman’s pearls, and for the first time in my life I understood that the seats that matter are not the ones you were born owing, but the ones filled by people who chose to be there.

Chapter 8 — The Hydrangeas

She signaled the coordinator.

Within moments Maura and Lennox’s sister were moving the big floral arrangements from the altar and setting them along the empty pews on my side of the aisle, covering the absence with hydrangeas so the photographer would not capture the hole where my blood relatives should have been.