Chapter 10
We’d celebrated the last evening of 2012 with a glass of champagne, but we hadn’t stayed up to watch the ball drop at midnight. January 1 was going to be a big day for us, and we’d decided to make an early night of it.
Before we went to bed, we checked the living room at the back of the sprawling house where my brothers and sister and I had grown up. The furniture had been replaced with rows of folding chairs decorated with white streamers. Tomorrow, each chair would have a flower holder bearing a white rose tipped with coral. Tomorrow, before the ceremony, the florist who brought those roses would also bring flowers of every variety and color to be placed in the vases waiting for them. Ludo chose them so when their mingled scents filled the room, it would be the epitome of ro
