Three days before her wedding, the girl I had raised for twenty-two years asked me not to come.
She couldn’t look me in the eye when she said it. We were sitting across from each other at a small café, and she stared at the table while she explained that her biological mother, Brenda, felt sensitive. That seeing me at the main table or in the family photos might make Brenda feel displaced. That she wanted Brenda to have the role of Mother of the Bride. That she wanted the perfect photo with her “real” parents.
I felt the ground disappear beneath me.
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