Chapter 2 - The Ring That Wasn't for Me
Then one Sunday afternoon, when I was twenty-two, Nate showed up at the door with a small velvet box sitting in his palm.
My heart shot up so fast my head spun.
"Can I talk to Sadie?" he asked.
I just looked at him. "Sadie?"
"Yeah. She out in the garden?"
I stepped back from the doorway and didn't say a word.
From the kitchen window I watched him kneel in the dirt between the tomato vines.
I watched both her hands fly up over her mouth.
I watched her nod so hard those curls of hers bounced against her cheeks.
That night I cried into my pillow so no one down the hall would hear.
The thoughts that ran through me were ugly enough that I still wince remembering them.
There's no way he wants her more than me.
He has to have some other reason. Nobody marries Sadie without an angle.
Knowing now how close I landed to the truth — that's the part that still stings.
Next morning I smiled and sat next to her, building a wedding board on Pinterest.
"You're my maid of honor," she told me. "Say you promise."
"I promise, Sadie."
Some part of me kept waiting for our parents to step in and stop it.
They just smiled and said Nate would take good care of her.
The wedding was small.
Nate wore a gray suit and broke down crying the second she appeared at the end of the aisle.
My parents were still smiling.
"You picked well, son," Dad said, clapping Nate on the shoulder.
That one landed like a slap.
I watched Nate slide the ring onto my sister's finger.
And I stood there wondering whether I'd ever really known my best friend at all.
Three years went by.
I made my peace with the hurt, and I met a good man of my own.
Sadie moved into a little yellow house with Nate out on the western edge of Millbrook.
She called me every morning at nine on the dot to tell me what she'd picked out to wear.
Then came the call I'd been begging the universe for.
"I'm gonna be a mom," Sadie whispered. "It's twins, Meg. Two of them."
I slid right down onto my apartment floor, laughing and crying at the same time.
My whole life, people had told us Sadie would never get an ordinary life.
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Now she was going to be somebody's mother. Two somebodies.
I should have known a joy that size never shows up by itself.
