I stood there with that little white card in my hand.
My husband Mark was in the back room with Hannah. I could have gone and gotten him. It would have taken thirty seconds. He would have walked out there and torn that gold card in half in front of everybody, and Crystal knew it.
I could have done it myself. I could have marched to the front row, picked up that card, and put it in Crystal’s hand and told her exactly where she could sit.
I could have made a scene in front of two hundred people.
On Hannah’s wedding day.
I looked at Crystal. She was smiling at me. Waiting. She wanted me to fight. I could see it in her eyes. She wanted me to cry, or yell, or go running to Mark. Then she could look sad and wounded and tell everybody how the stepmother ruined the wedding.
I put the little white card back on the chair.
“Of course,” I said.
Something flickered across her face. Surprise, maybe. Then she smiled again, turned around, and walked back up the aisle toward the front row, her champagne dress swishing.
I sat down in the last row and folded my hands in my lap.
I’ve raised Hannah since she was six.
I met her father at a church potluck in the fall of 2006. He was standing by the dessert table holding two paper plates, trying to figure out how to get a slice of chocolate cake onto both of them with one hand. He was thirty-two, tall, with tired eyes and a stain on his tie that looked like grape juice.
“Here,” I said, and I held one of the plates for him.
“Thanks,” he said. “My daughter wants chocolate. I want lemon. I’m trying to keep the peace.”
“Where’s your daughter?”
He pointed. Under one of the long folding tables, half hidden by a paper tablecloth, a little girl with brown pigtails was sitting cross-legged on the floor. She was holding a stuffed rabbit with one ear missing. She was watching every single person in that room like a little hawk.
“She doesn’t like crowds,” Mark said.
“She likes to know where everybody is,” I said.
He looked at me funny. “How’d you know that?”
“I was a kid like that too.”
He told me later that was the moment he decided to ask me out.
Hannah’s mother had left two years before that. Crystal was twenty-two when she had Hannah. Twenty-six when she walked out. She met a man who sold boats in Lake Havasu, Arizona, and one morning she packed two suitcases, kissed Hannah on the forehead while she was eating her Cheerios, and drove away.
She didn’t call for four months. When she finally did, she talked to Mark for ten minutes about the divorce papers, and she didn’t ask to talk to Hannah at all.
The first time I came over to Mark’s house for dinner, Hannah hid behind his leg the whole time. She wouldn’t say a word to me. She wouldn’t eat. She just stared at me with those big, serious brown eyes.
When I was putting on my coat to leave, she finally spoke.
“Are you going to go away too?”
I knelt down in front of her. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t want to make a promise I couldn’t keep.
“I’m going to go home tonight,” I said. “And then I’m going to come back on Saturday, if you’ll let me. Is that okay?”
She thought about it for a long time.
“Bring a rabbit,” she said. “For Mr. Hops. He’s lonely.”
I came back on Saturday with a stuffed rabbit. I came back the Saturday after that. And the one after that.
Mark and I got married nine months later in the backyard. Hannah was the flower girl. She threw all of her petals at the very first row and then stood in front of me through the whole ceremony, holding both rabbits.
Sophia Rivers is an experienced News Content Editor with a sharp eye for detail and a passion for delivering accurate and engaging news stories. At TheArchivists, she specializes in curating, editing, and presenting news content that informs and resonates with a global audience.
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