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.

The sentence did not arrive all at once. It came in parts, each word placed with cruel precision, as if Beatrice Sterling were selecting knives from a velvet case and testing their balance before deciding which one would cut deepest.

The bridal boutique on Rodeo Drive went so quiet that I could hear the whisper of satin as a consultant behind me shifted her weight. Someone near the veil display inhaled sharply, and a woman I had never met lowered the crystal flute in her hand halfway to her mouth and stared at me with open pity.

Even the music, some soft instrumental arrangement of an old love song, seemed suddenly too loud and too mocking. And there I was, standing on a low mirrored platform in a gown that looked as though it had been made from winter light.

The dress was white in the purest sense of the word, not ivory, not cream, and not champagne. It featured hand-stitched French lace climbing over my shoulders like frost and pearls sewn so delicately into the bodice they seemed to float rather than shimmer.

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.