She did not. She stood between them as if the aisle had been a road and she was finished walking it. The cord dangled. One sneaker lace was undone. She was eleven, and she had the gray hoodie on over a dress Naomi had bought her, navy, with a sash she had untied in the car and stuffed into the pocket. The dress hem showed beneath the hoodie like a fact she had not managed to hide.
Reverend Bell stepped half a pace forward. "Perhaps," he said gently, "we might let the family—"
"No." Lauren's word came out too fast. She heard it. Everyone heard it. She shut her eyes once, and when she opened them she was trying to repair the syllable into something kinder. "I mean it's all right. David. We can step into the vesting room. We don't have to do this here."
"You already did," Emma said. She was not crying yet. Crying would come later, in a bathroom that smelled of industrial soap, with her forehead against a tile. Now she was only shaking. "You said put it down. You didn't ask what she said. You already knew there was something."
"I knew there was a child in the middle of a wedding with her dead mother's phone," Lauren said, and the honesty of the sentence made it worse, because it was not the whole honesty. "I knew that much. Emma, I am not your enemy."