Chapter 1: THE WOMAN AT THE WEDDING
My mother had been dead for three years when she walked into my sister’s wedding.
I was standing near the front pew, watching Sophie try not to cry as her new husband slipped a ring onto her finger. Sunlight poured through the stained-glass windows, laying patches of blue and amber across her dress, and for the first time in years our family looked almost ordinary. Then the heavy church doors opened behind us, and a cold September draft moved through the aisle.
A few guests glanced back, probably expecting a late relative. I turned too, more annoyed than curious, until I saw the woman standing beneath the doorway. She wore a gray coat that seemed too large for her thin frame, and silver ran through hair I remembered as dark brown.
I knew the scar beside her left eyebrow.
“Mom?”
The word escaped before I could stop it. The minister fell silent, Sophie turned from the altar, and our father slowly rose from the front pew.
Three years earlier, a police officer had knocked on our door after two in the morning. Mom’s car had gone through a barrier on Hollow Creek Road and burned badly enough that we weren’t allowed to see the body. There had been DNA results, a death certificate, a funeral, and a walnut coffin I watched disappear beneath six feet of dirt.
Now she was ten yards away from me.
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