I was married on a night with a fat silver moon, on the same ceremony grounds where, once, I had been thrown away.
I thought about that as they dressed me how the last time I'd stood near these grounds under a moon like this, I'd worn moonlight and hope and three years of practiced vows for a man who was going to call my bond an inconvenience and hand my place to my best friend. I'd been a girl then. Certain the ceremony was the beginning of her life. Not knowing it was the end of the life she'd imagined and the brutal, necessary beginning of the one she'd actually get.
I was not that girl anymore. That was the whole distance of it. The girl who'd stood on these grounds a lifetime ago would not have survived what I'd survived, would not have known what I knew, would not have been enough
