Once he’s gone, I look around, realizing I don’t know anyone here. The entire Petropoulos family is inside, and although I’ve seen the cousins, aunts, and uncles on occasion, I don’t know any of them well enough to just walk up and break into conversation.

Maybe this is why your circle is so small, Sabrina’s voice rings in my ear.

A small circle is a quality circle, I snark back, reaching for a bacon-wrapped shrimp as it passes on a tray.

I’m lifting it to my mouth when a hand comes around my elbow. Turning in surprise, I blurt, “Oh, sorry!” and begin to hand back the hors d’oeuvre until I realize it’s only Alex, and I’ve just dropped the shrimp into her hand.

She stares down at it and then up at me before shrugging and popping it in her mouth. “Come with me,” she mumbles around the bite. “We’re sitting up front.”

“What?” I say, resisting when she tugs me forward. “No, I—”

“No argument,” she says, marching forward. “I have strict instructions from Mom: you’re family.”

This catches in my throat—a ball of cottony emotion gets trapped in there. Pulling my wrap around my shoulders, I follow her to a seat on the groom’s side, in the very front row.

Alex sits in the third seat in, pulling me down beside her in the fourth. “It’s starting soon,” she says. “Mom told me to go sit so people would make their way over. Are they?”

I look behind her and see that, yes, people are beginning to make their way toward the ushers waiting at the entrance to the aisle. Seats are filling, the sun is setting, and the scene is breathtaking.

“I’ve wanted to meet you for years,” Alex says, staring ahead at the altar—a small wooden arch decorated with flowers so lush I want to reach out and pinch a petal to see if it’s real. “Well—meet again.”

“Me?” She was only three when Elliot and I had our falling-out.

Falling-out.

God, what a weird phrase. Other people have a falling-out. What we had felt like a rupture. But really, was it? A breach along the fault line, maybe. A mallet cracked against our weak spot. And fate went in with a jackhammer.

Alex nods, turning to me. She looks so much like Elliot at fourteen that my breath is paralyzed for a second, like I’ve been punched in the solar plexus. Her eyes are hazel, wide behind her glasses. Her hair is thick and dark, barely tamed into submission by the flowers pinned around her oval face. Her neck is long, swanlike, hands delicate and bony. On Alex it looks graceful somehow; probably because she dances and she’s learned to use her slim build to her advantage. Elliot’s body always just seemed a little like a box full of tools: sharp angles, long bones, dangerous when clumsily wielded.

“He loves you so much,” she says. “I swear he didn’t bring a girl home forever.”