Not my parents, not my sister, not my aunt or my uncle or my cousins or anyone else from my side of the family.
On the day I married the man I loved more than anything, I stood at that altar with Owen’s family filling every single seat on his side of the aisle and a haunting, devastating, humiliating emptiness on mine. My best friend, Kelsey, sat alone in the front row on my side, trying her absolute best to make it look less pathetic by spreading out her belongings and moving around between photos, but nothing could hide the truth.
I smiled through the entire ceremony, held Owen’s hands as we exchanged our vows, danced at the reception with all the joy I could muster, and pretended with every ounce of strength I possessed that my heart wasn’t breaking into smaller and smaller pieces with every single glance at those empty chairs.
Afterward, in the days and weeks that followed, my family acted like absolutely nothing had happened.
My mom called me a week later to ask how I was doing, her tone casual and light and completely unchanged, like she hadn’t just deliberately skipped the most important day of my entire life. When I finally worked up the courage to bring it up—carefully and gently, because I was still trying not to rock the boat—she sighed heavily like I was being tiresome and said she’d been busy with a work project that couldn’t be postponed.
