Chapter 6
Saylor
By the time I find Celeste, the service is minutes from starting.
She’s standing near the entrance to the main hall, arms crossed, one hand gripping the opposite elbow like she’s physically holding herself together.
Her lips are redder than when we arrived, like a fresh coat of paint.
She must have found a bathroom and touched up her makeup again because although the rest of her looks put-together, her eyes betray her.
Red-rimmed. Slightly swollen. The face of a woman who’s been crying and then carefully pretending she hasn’t.
“There you are,” she says, and the relief in her voice catches me off guard. Like she wasn’t sure I’d come back. “Where did you disappear to?”
“Got turned around.” The lie tastes sour. “Big venue.”
I want to tell her. The words are right there, stacked behind my teeth like cars in a traffic jam—Raven, the surrogacy, the baby, the forged documents, Eleanor’s legal maneuvering. All of it pressing against the back of my mouth, demanding to be spoken.
But the funeral attendants have begun herding everyone toward their seats.
The string quartet has shifted from warm-up noodling to something deliberate and somber.
And Celeste has a folded piece of paper sticking out of her dress pocket—her speech, the one she wrote at three in the morning, the one she is so determined to deliver for Whitney’s sake.
I can’t drop a bomb on her and then send her to a podium.
It will just have to wait. A delayed truth for the sake of mercy.
“Ready?” I ask, offering my arm.
She threads her hand through the crook of my elbow. Her fingers are ice cold. “No.”
“Fair. Should we go in anyway?”
“Definitely.”
We enter the hall. Two hundred chairs are arranged in precise rows facing a raised stage, and nearly every seat is occupied.
The hydrangeas are all over—lining the aisle, framing the stage, clustered around an enormous portrait of Whitney that sits on an easel surrounded by white candles.
She’s laughing in the photo. Mid-laugh, actually, caught in the act of finding something hilarious, her red curls wild around her face.
She looks alive in a way that makes the rest of the room feel like a museum exhibit.
A staff member guides us toward the back rows, gesturing to two open seats near the aisle. Celeste nods and starts to sit, but then someone official looking with a clipboard and headset intercepts us. She gently touches Celeste’s arm.
“Ms. Brinley, I’m sorry. Please, come with me. I have seats near the family closer to the front.”
Celeste stiffens beside me. She opens her mouth—probably to decline—but the coordinator is already moving, and we’re trailing her up the center aisle like two people being led to the principal’s office.
Every step takes us deeper into the room, past rows of straight-spined people with stoic faces, most of them dressed in the kind of understated black that communicates wealth without trying.
A few heads turn as we pass. I catch whispers.
“Celeste’s new husband?”
“Doubtful. I heard she’s barely divorced.”
“Probably just some arm candy.”
My stomach churns at their audaciously accurate commentary. Except I don’t think I’m here to be candy. More like…decoration.
The coordinator deposits us in the second row, just behind a cluster of people I assume are family or inner circle. She gives Celeste a warm, conspiratorial smile. “Whitney would want her best friend up close.”
She disappears before anyone can intervene—but the woman who I’m assuming is Eleanor, Whitney’s mother, has noticed.
She’s seated at the far end of the first row, and her gaze finds us with the precision of a guided missile.
Red hair pulled tight. Pearls. Chanel. She looks exactly like the woman Celeste described in the car, except worse in person, because photographs can’t capture the particular quality of a stare that makes you feel like you’ve been weighed, measured, and found insufficient.
Her eyes move from Celeste to me, and the assessment is slow and thorough. Shoes. Trousers. Watch. Shoulders. Face. It’s not attraction; it’s inventory. She’s cataloging me the way you’d catalog evidence, filing me away for future use.
I meet her gaze and hold it, because I’m Australian at heart and we don’t look away first. After a beat, she turns to face the stage.
Celeste hasn’t noticed the exchange. She’s staring at Whitney’s portrait, her jaw locked so tight I can see the muscles working beneath her skin. Her hands are folded in her lap. Her printed speech sits on her knee, slightly crumpled where she’s been gripping it.
I settle into my seat and try to focus.
The service begins with a priest who speaks about Whitney with the careful generality of a man working from notes he received that morning.
He mentions her kindness, her creativity, her love of life.
He does not mention anything specific—no stories, no details, no evidence that he ever met her.
It’s a eulogy built from adjectives, and it floats through the room without landing on anyone.
Next comes the montage. A screen descends behind the stage and the lights dim, and for three minutes the room watches Whitney Trace grow up in photographs.
Baby pictures. Childhood. Graduation. I scan the images as they cycle—Whitney in a field of sunflowers; Whitney at what looks like a book signing; Whitney on a beach with her arms thrown wide.
But what strikes me is how after the high school graduation picture, Celeste appears in nearly every frame afterward.
Suddenly it’s like I’m watching two lives unfold in tandem, two stories so tightly interwoven they’ve become a single narrative.
The epiphany sweeps over me and the magnitude of the situation stretches as wide as the ocean outside.
This is more than friendship. This was Celeste’s twin flame.
Which is maybe why I’m watching Celeste watch the screen as if she’s in a trance. One by one the memories fill the room, haunting her.
Then one image slides into frame that makes my chest tighten.
Whitney and Celeste, young—maybe late teens—sitting on the hood of a car, legs dangling, both mid-laugh.
Whitney’s red curls are enormous and Celeste’s hair is pulled back in a messy bun and they’re wearing matching university sweatshirts and the photo radiates the kind of joy that only exists when you don’t know yet how much you have to lose.
Beside me, Celeste makes a small sound. Not a sob. More like the sound of something cracking that was already under pressure. I find her hand in the dark and hold it. She doesn’t look at me, but her fingers lock around mine.
Another photo: Whitney, trying on wedding dresses, showing off the massive diamond on her left hand.
The image is there and gone in four seconds, dissolving into a shot of Whitney blowing out birthday candles.
The last photo is a family portrait of Whitney, Eleanor, and a man in a suit that must’ve been her father.
An entire montage of Whitney’s life—Celeste present for the thick of it, but cut out at the end. It’s uncomfortably symbolic.
The short film ends. Polite applause. The lights come back up.
Eleanor is on stage. She must’ve slipped up there while we were distracted with the presentation I’m certain she prepared.
She grips the podium with both hands and delivers a eulogy that is technically perfect and emotionally vacant.
She speaks about Whitney’s accomplishments—her career at The Belly, her volunteer work, her “zest for life.” She doesn’t cry.
She doesn’t pause. She doesn’t tell a single story that couldn’t have been pulled from a LinkedIn profile.
It’s four minutes long, and when she finishes, the applause is respectful and measured, the kind of applause that acknowledges effort without being moved by it.
She returns to her seat. The room settles into an expectant quiet.
The event coordinator who escorted us up to the apparent VIP section of this funeral clicks across the stage, her heels punctuating the silence.
She adjusts the microphone with manicured fingers, the silver bracelet on her wrist catching the light as she leans forward.
“Before we close the formal portion of our service, Whitney’s dearest friend, Celeste Brinley, would like to say a few words. ”
She gestures toward our row. Two hundred heads turn.
And Celeste doesn’t move.
Her hand is still in mine and I feel it happen—the sudden, total lockdown. Her fingers go rigid. Her breathing, which had been shallow but steady, stops entirely for a beat before restarting in short, rapid pulls. Her eyes are fixed on the stage like it’s a cliff edge she’s been asked to jump from.
I lean close. “I think that’s you.”
“I realize. My legs won’t move.” Her voice is barely audible. Thin. Stripped of every ounce of the wit and composure I’ve come to associate with her in the six hours I’ve spent with this woman.
“That’s all right. We’ll get them moving.”
I stand first, keeping hold of her hand, and ease her up beside me.
She rises like someone surfacing from deep water—slow, unsteady, blinking against the light.
I place my other hand on the small of her back and guide her toward the aisle, matching her pace, which is glacial.
Her heels strike the floor—tap, pause, tap-tap—like a metronome petering out, each step threatening to fold beneath her.
We reach the short staircase leading up to the stage.
I walk her to the bottom step. She’s gripping the railing with one hand, my hand with the other, and for a moment we stand there.
Two hundred people watching. The portrait of Whitney laughing behind the podium.
The one billion white hydrangeas. The ocean light pouring through the windows.