He did not come.

And a nine-year-old, somehow, knew it.

Chapter 6 — The Invitation

A few months later, the invitations arrived — a lavish country-club wedding, embossed and formal.

They had invited me.

And they had invited the children.

I refused without a second’s hesitation.

There was no version of the world in which I would sit in a room full of people and watch my husband marry the woman who had helped take my family apart, on the far side of a year in which I had lost my marriage and my sister and my child.