20 years after my mother vanished on her wedding day, I found her wedding dress at a garage sale. I bought it. When I got home and felt the inner lining, I found a secret object stitched into the hem.
The morning my mother disappeared was supposed to be one of the happiest days of her life.
I was twelve, old enough to understand what a wedding meant but too young to comprehend how a person could simply vanish. That day was warm and bright — the kind of day that seemed made for beginnings. Our house buzzed with energy; my aunts were in the kitchen, the florist was delivering bouquets, and my mother, Caroline, was upstairs getting ready to marry David, the man who’d been part of our lives for five years.
