“Do you think the world will mind? That we didn’t give them the circus they expected?”

Celeste stood in the small cottage at the edge of the Aldridge estate, looking at herself in the vintage mirror. There were no diamond-encrusted tiaras, no sixteen-foot trains, no designers hovering with gold pins. She wore a dress of ivory silk that flowed like water, simple and unadorned, reflecting the clarity she had found in the wreckage of the last year.

Amara, standing behind her, fastened a single string of pearls around Celeste’s neck—the same pearls her mother had worn on a humid afternoon in Bulacan decades ago. “The world isn’t invited to this...