Nobody from the Dupont family attended the wedding in September.

Giselle told me, at that table, that the explanation she had been given was a scheduling catastrophe involving a board meeting and a hospital appointment, and that she had accepted it, and that her own mother had been furious about it for a week and had then let it go.

And she said: “I had three hundred people in that courtyard and forty of them were mine and the rest were his, and not one single person on his side was related to him, and I looked at that in the photographs in October and I thought: that’s sad.

That’s a sad family.”

Part Twenty-Three: The Mechanics

The question I get asked most often, by a very wide margin, is not how I felt.