“Will you help me make a wedding board?”
I forced a smile.
“Of course.”
“You’ll be my maid of honor.”
She grabbed both my hands.
“Promise?”
“I promise.”
Part of me expected our parents to object.
They had always been extremely protective of Gracie.
Sometimes overly protective.
They monitored her friendships.
Controlled her spending.
Discussed her future while she was standing in the same room, as though she could not hear them.
Yet when Noah announced their engagement, my parents simply smiled.
“Noah will take excellent care of her,” Mom said.
Dad clapped Noah on the shoulder.
“You chose wisely.”
Something about that sentence hurt more than it should have.
Their Wedding
The wedding was small.
Noah wore a charcoal suit.
When Gracie entered the ceremony room, he began crying before she even reached him.
There was nothing calculated in his expression.
No performance.
Only love.
Still, while he placed the ring on her finger, I wondered whether I truly knew the man I had called my best friend for most of my life.
Friendship
Three years passed.
Eventually, most of my private pain faded.
I met a kind man named Owen.
Gracie and Noah bought a yellow house near the edge of Cedarbrook.
She called me every morning at nine.
Sometimes she told me what she was wearing.
Sometimes she described whatever Noah had cooked for breakfast.
Sometimes she only wanted to explain that the weather looked “extremely Wednesday.”
Then came the telephone call I had secretly hoped she would make one day.
“I’m going to be a mother.”
I sat down on the floor of my apartment.
“What?”
“We’re having twins.”
I laughed and cried at the same time.
For most of Gracie’s life, people had spoken endlessly about everything she would supposedly never do.
She would never live independently.
Never marry.
Marriage
Never build a home.
Never become a mother.
Now she was carrying twins.
I wanted joy that large to arrive without fear.
It did not.
34 Weeks
The pregnancy was difficult almost from the beginning.
Gracie experienced complication after complication.
Noah attended every appointment.
He memorized every medication.
He kept notebooks filled with questions for her doctors.
Then, at thirty-four weeks, Gracie was rushed to Rosehaven Medical Center.
By the time I arrived, she had already been taken into surgery.
The waiting-room clock crawled past midnight.
I stared at the double doors, willing someone to come through with good news.
