Chapter 24: Whose Wedding

On the fourteenth of December I woke up in my own bed, with a cat on my feet.

It was supposed to be my wedding day.

I lay there for a while and waited to feel something enormous.

What I felt was a little hungry, and mostly curious about the weather.

Gemma knocked on my door with two cups of coffee, one black and one with milk.

"I made yours right," she said. "Donovan taught me."

"When did you two talk about it?"

"We have a group text. It's called Justine's Coffee."

I drank the first cup in the doorway, with the cat winding around my ankles, and nobody else touched it.

At four o'clock the ballroom of the Brooklyn Harbor was lit gold and full of white flowers.

My cousin stood at the far end in a plain ivory dress, with her fiance beside her.

Sixty guests turned in their chairs to watch her come down the aisle.

I stood up with her, in a blue dress, as her maid of honor.

When she said her vows, her voice cracked on the third word, and her fiance laughed and wiped his own eyes.

I cried too.

It was nobody's wedding but theirs, and I let myself enjoy that, in a ballroom that was supposed to hold mine.

Afterward the guests drifted to the tables.

I stopped at the seating chart on its easel by the door.

The planner had made it up in careful gold letters.

At the head table I found my name in the second seat.

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