So I have kept it.

It is the possession I guarded most fiercely through everything that followed, the simple stubborn fact that I am still a person who can love, and that this was never the fool’s error he made it look like, but the bravest thing a grieving woman can do.

Chapter 6 — The Small Wedding

The wedding was small.

It could not have been anything else, given what it was, given the whispers that trailed us everywhere: a widow marrying her dead husband’s identical twin.

We did not pretend it was ordinary.