My mother said I should stay in the kitchen during the wedding photos—only until the “important guests” were gone. I didn’t mention that for the past year I had been dating a man whose arrival required a presidential security sweep. Then the security team cleared the main hall.

When the music swelled and Serena appeared, she looked past the crowd and found me. Her face cracked open with surprise, and I mouthed, “You’re beautiful.”

She started crying, and for the first time that weekend, it didn’t look like a performance.

After the ceremony, guests made jokes that weren’t really jokes while glancing at Christian and me. During cocktail hour, my mother hovered beside me as if proximity might rewrite history.

“This is our Penelope,” she said to a guest, smiling too widely. “She does very important work in D.C.”

“She’s a policy analyst and she’s brilliant,” Christian added when the guest asked for details.

My mother laughed nervously, while my father stayed close, looking like a man who realized he’d been reading the wrong book about his daughter. Serena and her new husband, Julian Redcliff, were swept into a storm of congratulations.

Halfway through dinner, I excused myself to get air and stood near a hedge on the quiet lawn. Christian found me a moment later.

“Do you want to leave?” he asked gently. “We’ve already showed up for you.”

“Not yet,” I said. “I want to stay for her.”