My daughter was seven years old that fall, with red hair and freckles and the kind of stubbornness that comes from eating breakfast alone in a kitchen while your mother types code for a law firm on the Upper East Side.

3 | The Courtyard Man

I told myself I would ask him at the reception, when the music was loud enough that no one else could hear.

That plan lasted about forty minutes.

Peter was standing alone in the courtyard below the second-floor window, still in his tuxedo, his back to the building like a man waiting for a verdict.

I went down the service stairs so my dress wouldn't drag on the carpet.

When I pushed open the door, he didn't turn around.

"You're supposed to be upstairs," he said.

"I'm supposed to be marrying you in an hour," I said.

"So you can imagine how I feel about the last twenty minutes."

That got him to turn.

His face was the same face that proposed to me in a diner in Queens, the same face I watched fall asleep on my couch the first week we met, the one where he said I was the first woman who didn't want anything from him.

"What did you hear?" he asked.

"I heard Mrs. Teague say the papers were old and I was never supposed to find them."

He didn't deny it.

That was the part that got me.

He didn't even try.

"She's a family friend," he said.

"She's known my mother since before I was born."

"Then why does she talk to you like a banker?"

He looked at the gravel.

Later I would learn from Dee that Mrs. Teague had been in Peter's life since he was nine, that she had a way of making herself the only adult in the room, but standing there in the courtyard I only knew what I could see.

And what I could see was a man who was not surprised by any of this.

"I need you to keep the ceremony simple," he said.

"No reading the letters.

No talking about the wills."

"Whose wills?"

"Gwen."

"Whose wills, Peter?"

I never got an answer, because his phone lit up in his jacket pocket and he pulled it out without thinking, the way people do when they have already forgotten who they're standing in front of.

The screen said R.

Teague — Annulment Contact.

I read it upside down from three feet away.

He flipped it face down against his thigh, but I had already memorized it, and the small fury in my chest had already started doing what it does, which is work.

I do IT for a law firm on Third Avenue.

I have spent nine years watching attorneys chase down records that people thought they had buried.

I don't know how to sew, I can't bake, but I can read a phone screen and I can move faster than anyone expects.

"Give me your phone," I said.

"Why."

"Because you're about to walk into a church and promise me things, and I want to see the contacts list you keep behind your lock screen."

He hesitated, and that hesitation told me more than the text had.

He handed it over.

I opened the contacts, found the name, and renamed it in my own phone with a QuickShare that took eleven seconds.

Then I wiped the transfer from his notifications and gave the phone back with a smile that felt like a door closing.

"Go inside," I said.

"I'll be up."

He left first, and I stood in the courtyard with the gravel biting through my wedding shoes and the church bells going off four blocks away, and I let myself breathe twice before I went back up.

The dressing room was exactly where I left it.

My veil was not.

It was on the wrong side of the chair, folded like someone had lifted it and put it down in a hurry, and I know because I had laid it across the armrest myself before I went downstairs.

And on the chaise, where Rosie's lace dress had been hanging all morning, there was a plain white dress with a plain white tag, and the tag had been cut off clean, and the bit of string was still on the hanger.

My daughter's dress was gone.

In its place was something that looked like it had come out of a box marked in bulk.

I stood there with my hand on the fabric and thought, someone has been in this room.