I did not say: and I’m so glad we worked out the venue situation. I did not say: Claire, thank you for inviting me back. None of that needed to be said in a room full of their friends and his family. It existed between us and could stay there.
## The Day Itself: Scenes From a Wedding
I want to tell you about the things I actually remember rather than the things I think I’m supposed to remember.
The drive up on the morning of the wedding. I had offered to take a friend from the city who was also invited as a plus-one situation; she kept me company for the two-hour drive and we talked about her life and my life and said almost nothing about where we were going or why. This was a relief. By the time we pulled into Willowmere’s gravel driveway, I had spent most of the drive thinking about things that had nothing to do with the previous six weeks.
Jordan Ellis at the entrance, with her clipboard and her warmth. She had managed this entire situation with a professionalism I found genuinely remarkable, and I told her so when she recognized me and greeted me by name. She said it was her job and smiled in a way that suggested she was also privately very glad the situation had resolved the way it had.
The bridal suite upstairs. Claire in the chair. Her hair half-done and her face bare except for what the stylist had already applied, and the look on her face when I came in — not the performed happiness I had sometimes seen from her at events she was producing, but something more unguarded than that. She was getting married in two hours and she knew it and it was real to her in a way that I could see.