“Brenda said I had to stay hidden in here,” she said, “until the whole ceremony was finished.”

Every sound of that busy lodge, the music tuning up outside, the clatter of the kitchen, the murmur of a hundred gathering guests, seemed to fall away into a total silence, until there was nothing left in the world but my daughter’s face and the terrible sentence she had just spoken.

Brenda said I had to stay hidden.

On a washing-room floor.

During her own father’s wedding.