My hands were not steady because I was calm; they were steady because I was holding myself together by main force.

But I had learned enough, in that single hour, to understand a hard truth about silence.

If I had said nothing, if I had quietly called the wedding off and let everyone drift home confused, the story that would have filled the vacuum was already written, and it would have starred my daughter as the difficult child who could not share her father, the little girl whose jealousy wrecked a wedding.

Brenda had been laying the groundwork for exactly that story for months.