Chapter 1

At our twentieth-anniversary dinner, my husband gave my seat to his late best friend’s widow.

Then told forty of our closest friends and relatives that he was in love with her.

The first thing I noticed when I entered the private dining room was the ivory place card.

I had written “Hannah Reed” myself in blue ink, with the tail of the H extending slightly farther than it should.

The card belonged at Daniel’s right hand. Instead, it was sitting at table twelve, beside the kitchen door.

Elise Turner was in my seat.

She wore the dark green dress I had helped her choose three weeks earlier.

The white roses I had ordered for the head table stood beside her glass.

Daniel leaned down to move the glass for her, their shoulders nearly touching.

When he saw me, he stood—but made no move to give me back my chair.

“It’s a temporary change.” He intercepted me before I reached the table and lowered his voice. “Tonight is difficult for Elise. Peter loved this restaurant.”

“So you seated the woman whose anniversary we’re celebrating beside the kitchen?”

Daniel frowned. “It’s one chair. What difference does it make where you sit?”

“Then you sit at table twelve.”

Elise set down her glass. She glanced at the relatives and friends around the table, and her eyes quickly filled with tears.

“Hannah, if this bothers you, I’ll leave. I don’t want to ruin your evening.”

She spoke softly, but loudly enough for everyone at the head table to hear.

Daniel immediately placed a hand on her shoulder. “No one is asking you to leave.”

My mother-in-law, Ruth, cleared her throat and suggested that I sit down.

Several friends became deeply interested in their menus, as if refusing to look at me could make the humiliation disappear.

Arguing would only give them another way to make me the problem. I took my place card and walked to table twelve.

Twenty minutes into dinner, Daniel raised his glass.

He thanked his parents, our friends, and everyone who had helped him through the year since Peter’s death.

Then he turned to Elise.

“Some people help you live the right life,” he said. “Others remind you what it feels like to be alive. Elise is the second kind.”

No one raised a glass.

I looked at the man I had been married to for twenty years. “Then what am I?”

Daniel tightened his grip on the stem of his glass. “Hannah, don’t make me say something worse tonight.”

“You put another woman in my seat at our anniversary dinner. Finish what you started.”

Elise began to cry. Daniel took her hand at once, as though she were the one being hurt.

“I love her,” he said. “But I never intended to lose you. You’re stronger than she is. Please don’t turn a widow’s grief into something ugly.”

Once the first wave of pain passed, I could hear every small sound in the room—the scrape of silverware, the clink of a fork against china.

I didn’t cry. I didn’t touch the wine in front of me.

Instead, I turned over the place card still in my hand.

On the back, the event coordinator had left a note in pencil:

Table 12—changed at D. Reed’s request.

I walked back to the head table and placed the card in front of Daniel.

“You told the restaurant to move me?”

Elise stopped crying.

Daniel looked down at the note. He didn’t deny it.

“Yes.”