And then there were the betrayals. We had a slew of those. Our aunt Caroline knew the truth and never spoke up. A dear family friend helped daddy with our illegal adoption and never came clean until I confronted him. But my ex-husband was the biggest liar and cheat of all, even more worthless than I’d realized when I divorced him. He had blackmailed my adoptive father, killed the one person who wanted to tell me the truth about our mother’s death, and then tried to murder me when I figured out exactly what he’d done. And all for money. That’s all I had ever meant to him—money.

But as horrible as all those things had been to endure, they had led me here today, to my new job as an adoption PI, to a real sense of purpose for the first time in my life. I might have come to this church as Megan’s friend, but the job she’d hired me for still hovered in my brain like a hummingbird buzzing in the background. She would get her truth if I had anything to say about it. People deserve the truth.

Just then the latecomer dropped her handbag, the long leather clutch bag falling with a thump onto the old oak floor.

“Is she carrying rocks to throw at the bride and groom rather than rice?” I whispered to Kate.

“Shhh,” answered my sister, who was staring over her shoulder.

Making a mental note to corral the lady in the hat after the ceremony, I followed Kate’s gaze and focused on Megan. She had seed pearls woven into her fine blond hair, and a cathedral-length veil billowed out behind her. The dress was ivory silk, an A-line devoid of sparkle or beads. This elegant simplicity suited her personality, and by the admiring smile on Kate’s face I guessed she agreed with me.

We had become friendly with Megan and her fiancé, Travis, in the last few months. Who couldn’t be friends with folks as sweet and innocent and full of hope as those two? When I’d first met Megan, I figured she was about sixteen, but she came to me with a copy of her birth certificate proving she was twenty years old. That piece of paper had been my only clue in the adoption search, mainly because Megan was adamant that her adoptive parents not know she’d hired me. Besides being sweet and innocent, she was also as stubborn as a two-headed mule, a trait we happened to share.