At my bridal fitting, my fiancé’s mother looked me up and down in a $14,000 gown and said, “White is for girls who have a real family waiting at the end of the aisle.” And while the entire salon stood frozen, my fiancé lowered his eyes and said nothing.

A cathedral train spread behind me in a pool of silk and tulle. It was the kind of dress that made women put their hands to their throats and little girls imagine that weddings are the beginning of every good thing.

For one terrible second, I wasn’t thirty-two years old and one of the most powerful CEOs in San Francisco. I was eight again, standing by the window of a group home in Newark while another family came to pick up the girl who slept in the bed beside mine.

I was eleven, hearing one temporary guardian say to another that I was polite but there was something guarded about me, because children always know when they aren’t wanted. I was sixteen, sitting in a borrowed dress at a scholarship banquet, smiling through dessert while the parents at my table asked who had come with me.

“No one,” I had said back then. The old ache came back so fast it took the air out of my lungs, and my gaze moved to Miles.

He was standing just beyond the fitting area, one hand in his pocket and the other curled uselessly around the stem of a champagne glass. He had one of those faces that photographed beautifully and apologized well, and in another life, maybe that would have been enough.