Andrew’s parents were also not there, which I know because Ruth told me. Paige had told Andrew that they both wanted something very private, and Andrew, who genuinely did want something modest and meaningful rather than a spectacle, had agreed. So neither family was present. It was just the two of them and the officials required to make it legal.
Ruth and David saw photographs. I did not see photographs until after the dinner, when Andrew showed me some on his phone — his face, and Paige’s face, and a courthouse hallway, and the particular expression of someone on the most significant day of their life so far. Paige looked nervous and happy, which is the right combination for the occasion.
I looked at the photographs and I said, honestly: “She looks beautiful.”
Because she did. Because whatever else is true, she was my daughter getting married, and she looked the way I would have hoped she looked, and for a moment that was the only thing in the room.
Andrew said: “She was nervous all morning. The whole drive there she kept asking me whether I was sure.”
“What did you tell her?”
“That I was sure,” he said. “And I was. I am.”
I handed the phone back. I did not say that I should have been there. It was obvious, and saying it would not have added anything.
Paige has not suggested a celebration, a party to mark the occasion after the fact. I do not expect her to. That ship has sailed in the sense that the moment was a moment, and you cannot reconstitute moments after they are gone. What we can do is have other moments, new ones, that are ours rather than reconstructions of what we missed.