She is funnier than I am. That’s one of the truest things I can say about her. She has always had a quick dry wit that I admire and have never managed to replicate. She was also, for most of our lives, intensely focused on what other people thought of her. Not in an insecure, anxious way exactly — more in a deliberate social strategy kind of way. She was always aware of the impression she was making, always adjusting her presentation to the audience, always conscious of how things looked.
This quality served her well in some respects. She was popular in high school, made friends easily, built a social life in New York after college that I often heard about through our mother. It also meant that she was more susceptible than I was to caring deeply about the aesthetics of her life events. Her apartment had to look a certain way. Her social media had to look a certain way. Her birthday parties had to look a certain way.
I had always assumed her wedding would be the ultimate expression of this tendency, and I had been right.
Owen Parker came into her life about three years ago, through friends of friends at a birthday party in Brooklyn. He is thirty-one, works in finance, and is genuinely kind in a way that I respect. He has a straightforward manner that I have always found easy to be around, and I thought from early in their relationship that he was good for her — that his groundedness balanced something volatile in her.