I arrived at noon, two hours before the ceremony, and found Jordan Ellis at the entrance checking off a list. She recognized me immediately and gave me a warm professional handshake and said the bridal suite was upstairs if I wanted to see Claire before things got started.
I went upstairs.
Claire was in the bridal suite with Becca and Hannah and two other women I didn’t know well, and she was in the early stages of having her hair done, and when I came in she looked at me for a moment and then she said: “You’re here.”
“I’m here.”
She didn’t get up because she was in the chair, but she reached out her hand and I took it, and that was, in retrospect, the most important part of the day for me.
The ceremony happened. Owen’s parents sat in the front row and they were kind and welcoming when I was introduced to them at the reception, and I was careful and warm in return, and I thought that Claire’s narrative about our relationship and my narrative about our relationship were probably going to coexist for a long time in this expanded family, and that was going to require ongoing navigation rather than a single resolution.
I danced at the reception. I ate the food. I gave a toast that I had written and rewritten several times in the preceding weeks, and that I had kept deliberately brief and warm, focused on what I genuinely admired in both Claire and Owen and on what I wished them, without any subtext or undercurrent.