Prologue

I remember feeling trapped in some inescapable place while everyone danced around me and I remained motionless. My existence had to be flawed in some subtle but essential way. Why else would life be so unyielding to my happiness? Maybe the gods had decided they didn’t know what to do with me and had taken a pause. Or maybe it was the calm before the storm - before they let me have it. What? I don’t know. It wasn’t that anything was terribly wrong or I had committed some heinous crime. It was just a sense of hopelessness and not being able to orchestrate my life towards achieving my expectations. I didn’t understand why I felt so lost. And then I had a minor breakthrough. It must have been that silly fortune cookie I read the other day. Somehow, it triggered a nerve.

I’m a flexible thinker. I’ve done my share of trying to understand my life. I’ve even entertained the concept that we’re all connected, existing within a complex structure of connecting passages; an intricate woven fabric of time and space and that no one knew who was connected to whom or when and where their paths would meet. Sometimes, at the ‘eleventh hour’ when all seemed hopeless, the gods might throw someone or something your way to offer you safe passage. And, supposedly, there aren’t any coincidences.

I don’t live this adage on a daily basis and hadn’t given it much thought nor was I truly convinced of its validity until recently. I never suspected a family wedding I had been invited to would affect so many lives . . . especially mine. What should I tell you? It all began a few months ago . . .