I took her hand. That was all. There was nothing to say that would have been better than that.
Becca, who caught my eye from across the room and gave me a small nod. Hannah, who was fussing with someone’s buttonhole. The two other women I didn’t know well, who were getting ready with the ease of people who had been doing this kind of thing together for years.
The ceremony on the stone terrace. The gardens behind the officiant, just beginning to bloom — it was the last Saturday of April, and the conditions had cooperated. The chairs were filled. Owen stood at the front with his best man and his father and his college roommate, and he watched Claire come down the aisle with an expression I had seen on exactly three other people in my life at comparable moments, and I won’t try to describe it except to say that it was real.
The vows were the standard promises with two things they had written themselves woven in. Owen’s was about paying attention. Claire’s was about being chosen rather than settled for.
I cried at that one, which surprised me. Not in the way you cry when you’re sad, but in the way you cry when something is true and you recognize it.
The reception in the barn. The barn’s rental greenery, which was simple and abundant and looked, in the warm event lighting, genuinely beautiful — not the carefully curated statement that the original centerpiece plan would have made, but something that allowed the space to be itself. The caterers had done excellent work. The music was a three-piece band that played without amplification, which gave the room a warmth I didn’t expect.