And the room came apart.
I have never heard anything like it. Two hundred people rose to their feet at once — chairs scraping back, napkins falling, a wave of them standing up all across that ballroom — and they clapped, and they cheered, and some of them were crying, and the sound of it filled that hall and rolled up into the chandeliers and shook the whole place.
For my daughter.
For my Mia.
The broken girl, they’d stood up for. The broken girl, they were roaring for. She sat there in the middle of that thunder in her lavender dress with the tears running down her face and her chin up, and she looked — I’m not exaggerating, I will swear to it forever — she looked like a queen. Exactly like Claire had promised. Exactly like the queen of the whole wedding.
And Donna.
Donna stood alone in the middle of the dance floor, holding those stupid flowers, and her face turned red, and then a deeper red, and she looked around the room for one single ally, one person clapping for her, and there was no one. Not one person. Even the women she’d been standing next to had stepped away from her, had turned toward Mia, were clapping for a ten-year-old who had just, in front of everyone, said the truest thing anybody had ever said about Donna in her whole life.
