“Then why does he know you?”
She looked past me. At Emma, who’d come down the stairs and was standing at the bottom in her bathrobe.
“That isn’t really the question you should be asking,” the woman said.
And then someone spoke from the hallway behind us.
“Don’t.”
I turned around.
Ryan was standing at the edge of the staircase.
My daughter’s fiancé. In his tuxedo pants and an untucked white shirt, with his bow tie hanging undone around his neck. He must have heard the commotion from the groom’s room down the hall.
He was looking at the woman by the door.
And the woman’s whole face changed. All the bitterness drained out of it.
“Ryan,” she said softly.
I looked at Ryan. Then at the woman. Then at Ryan again.
“You know her?” I asked.
Ryan didn’t answer me. He was staring at her.
