Reed is set to meet me in ten minutes, which is more perfect timing than I could imagine. Sarah and Rufus are waiting outside the tent. Everyone’s in their spots.

I move toward the entrance, out of view of the ceremony area across the cobble street where people are beginning to gather, bused in from a meeting spot in town. We are safe hosts, making sure no one is drunk driving up or down this winding road.

Governor McCallester and his wife, Heather, have just arrived. Rumor has it they’re beginning an exploratory campaign for president. They sit behind Robert Joliet, the lieutenant governor, and his wife, Emory, a teacher at the local high school. There’s Dr. James Farthy, the mayor, talking to Police Commissioner Thomas Edwards. Of course, Graham’s godfather, Lawrence O’Brien, the chief justice, and his wife, Laura, are sitting in prime third-row spots, just behind the designated family seats.

I’m about to head to my spot when I see, exiting a bus in a tailored gray suit, Dr. Les Gerwig followed immediately by Dr. Bregg, stepping onto the grass like the kings and queens they think they are.

Seeing them now, even all these years later, sends a shiver of nausea through my entire body. Suddenly I’m eighteen and I’m back in those offices, trying to convince them that Ruthie’s gone. That we need to do something. I’m not crazy, I’m not drunk, I’m not PMSing. My best friend wasn’t coming back. They told me to give up but I wouldn’t. I would never give up.

I gag a little when the next bus pulls up and Dr. Felix Chastain struts off. He looks exactly the same. Aged backwards, even, like Jennifer Aniston or Anne Hathaway. The only thing that gives his age away is that I am older, too; his eyes are a little saggier, his shoulders more hunched. But he has money, a lot of money, more than the Walkers could probably dream of, and so all of the other tells have been fixed. He gifted us a weeklong stay at his ski-in ski-out cabin in Beaver Creek, Colorado, for a post-wedding trip. I started laughing when we received his card.

Dr. Felix Chastain doesn’t recognize me. None of them do. My name—the name famous from a novel everyone loved bringing up at the time—goes completely unremembered all these years later. My time at Covenant is just a blip in their memory, Ruthie and I apparently undeserving of more time and space in their brain.