The story was beginning, I thought, to crack, and Gregory could feel it cracking, and did not yet want to.

Chapter 16 — The Man Who Raised Me

The ceremony began a short while after that tense meeting, and Samantha came and looped her arm through mine as we waited at the entrance for the doors to open.

For just a second, standing there, I saw her again as the scared thirteen-year-old on the cold staircase, watching her mother pack and go.

And then I blinked, and she was who she actually was now, a poised and radiant woman of twenty-eight about to marry a good man, and the distance between those two images was fifteen years of my life and hers.