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wedding this size is like. No idea.”
    “I thought everything was pretty much taken care of.” Cindy knew that Leigh had been planning her daughter’s wedding ever since Bianca was five years old. “Is there a problem?”
    “Our mother is driving me absolutely nuts.”
    Cindy felt her headache spreading rapidly from the top of her spine to the bridge of her nose. She tried picturing her sister, who was three years younger, two inches shorter, and fifteen pounds heavier than she was, but she couldn’t remember the color of her hair. Last week it had been a deep chestnut brown, the week before that an alarming carrot red.
    “What’s she done now?” Cindy asked reluctantly.
    “She doesn’t like her dress.”
    “So change it.”
    “It’s too late to change it. The damn dress is already made. We have fittings this afternoon. I need you to be there.”
    “Me?”
    “You have to convince her the dress looks fabulous. She’ll believe
you
. Besides, don’t you want to see Heather and Julia in their dresses?”
    Cindy’s head snapped toward Julia, still watching from the doorway. “Heather and Julia have fittings this afternoon?”
    “No way!” Julia exclaimed. “I’m not going. I hate that stupid dress.”
    “Four o’clock. And they can’t be late,” Leigh continued, oblivious to Julia’s rant.
    “I’m not wearing that god-awful purple dress.” Julia began pacing back and forth in the doorway. “I look like a giant grape.”
    “The girls will be there,” Cindy said pointedly, watching her daughter throw her arms up into the air. “But I’m getting a really bad headache.”
    “A headache? Please, I’ve had a migraine for two days now. Look, I have a zillion things to do. I’ll see you at four o’clock.”
    “I’m not going,” Julia said as Cindy hung up the phone.
    “You have to go. You’re a bridesmaid.”
    “I’m busy.”
    “She’s my sister.”
    “Then you wear the damn dress.”
    “Julia.…”
    “Mother.…”
    Julia spun around on her heels and disappeared into the bathroom at the end of the hall, slamming the door behind her.
    (Flashback: Julia, a chubby toddler, her Shirley Temple curls framing dimpled, chipmunk cheeks, burrowing in against her mother’s pregnant belly as Cindy reads her a bedtime story; Julia, age nine, proudly displaying the fiberglass casts she wore after breaking both arms in a fall off her bicycle; Julia at thirteen, already almost a head taller than her mother, defiantly refusing to apologize for swearing at her sister; Julia the following year, packing her clothes into the new Louis Vuitton suitcase her father had bought her, then carrying it outside to his waiting BMW, leaving her childhood—and her mother—behind.)
    Later Cindy would wonder whether these images hadbeen a premonition of disaster looming, of calamity about to strike, whether she’d somehow suspected that the glimpse she’d caught of Julia disappearing behind the slammed bathroom door was the last she would see of her difficult daughter.
    Probably not. How could she, after all?
Why
would she? It was far too early in the day to be mindful of the fact that great calamity, like great evil, often springs from the womb of the hopelessly mundane, that defining moments rarely have meaning in the present and can be seen clearly only in retrospect. And so the morning of the day Julia went missing was rightly perceived by her mother as nothing more than one in a long string of such mornings, their argument only the latest installment of their ongoing debate. Cindy thought little of it beyond that which was obvious—her daughter was giving her a hard time, what else was new?
    Julia.…
    Mother.…
    Checkmate.

TWO
    “I met this great guy.”
    Cindy stared across the picnic table at her friend. Trish Sinclair was all careless sophistication and ageless grace. She shouldn’t have been beautiful, but she was, her face full of sharp, competing angles, her Modigliani-like features further